Why I still build iOS apps for myself
I wrote recently that I do not enjoy software development the way I used to. That is still true.
Most of the joy is gone.
Too much of modern development feels like meetings, process, alignment, and maintenance of systems nobody really likes but everyone has agreed to keep alive.
And yet over the last few months I built three iOS apps.
All three started the same way:
I wanted them to exist for myself.
That is really the whole explanation.
These apps were not market opportunities
None of these ideas came from “finding a gap in the market.”
That used to be possible. Back in the Windows Phone era, the store was full of holes. Popular services had no official clients, good third-party apps could get discovered, and building something small as an indie actually made sense.
On iOS, that world is mostly gone.
There is already an app for everything.
Or more accurately: there are already ten apps for everything, and at least three of them have better marketing than I will ever have.
Expense trackers already exist. Japanese learning tools already exist. Anime trackers already exist.
So I am under no illusion that I found some untouched category.
I did not.
I just kept running into products that technically solved my problem, but not in a way I actually wanted to live with.
The problem was never uniqueness
Yomu exists because I wanted to read Japanese without full furigana acting as a crutch.
Aira exists because I wanted a seasonal anime tracker that felt calm instead of noisy.
Ledgee exists because most expense tracking apps seem designed for people who enjoy “managing finances,” while I mostly just want to record a payment quickly and move on.
None of that is unique — and that is exactly why it still makes sense to build.
The interesting question is not:
“Has anyone built this before?”
The interesting question is:
“Does anything that already exists feel right to me?”
If the answer is no, I still have a reason to build.
Building for myself fixes a lot of fake questions
When I build these apps for myself, a lot of product thinking becomes simpler.
I do not need personas, user journey workshops, or long debates about whether a feature matters.
I use the app, so I know very quickly whether it is better or worse.
That also changes the kind of software I build.
I naturally remove things:
- no ads
- no dark patterns
- no fake engagement
- no endless feature creep just to justify a subscription screen
That does not make the apps commercially smart.
It just makes them honest.
And honesty is underrated in software.
The App Store is a bad place for this mindset
There is one obvious problem with this approach:
the App Store does not reward it very much.
Discovery is weak. Competition is absurd. Marketing matters more than implementation far more often than developers like to admit.
You can build something thoughtful, polished, and genuinely useful and still have almost nobody find it.
I already felt that while working on these apps, and I felt it even more strongly when Apple made joining the Developer Program unnecessarily difficult.
That experience did not exactly make indie iOS development feel welcoming.
If anything, it made the whole thing feel irrational.
Spend months building something for yourself, then fight for the right to publish it into a store where it will probably be invisible anyway.
From a business perspective, that is hard to defend.
So why do it at all?
Because this is one of the few places where programming still feels personal to me.
At work, software is usually a team sport wrapped in process.
In my own apps, software becomes small again. I notice a problem, build the thing, use it the next day, and if something is annoying, I fix it.
That loop is direct, and it reminds me of what I liked about programming before everything became layers of management and coordination.
These apps are probably the closest I get now to the feeling I had when building Windows Phone apps years ago, not because the platforms are similar, but because the motivation is: build something real, ship it, use it, own the result.
Success looks different now
I do not expect these apps to become a business.
They might make some money. They might not.
That is not the main point.
The main point is that they are mine, I use them, and they solve problems I actually have.
That is already more satisfying than working for weeks on a feature that gets discussed in five meetings and then hidden behind an A/B test.
Of course there is a downside:
I might be the ideal user, the main user, and almost the only user.
But I can live with that.
If a few other people find Yomu useful for studying Japanese, or Aira useful for tracking seasonal shows, or Ledgee useful for recording expenses without turning life into a spreadsheet, that is great.
If not, the apps still earned their place. I use them, they make my life slightly better, and they brought back a small part of programming that still feels good.
At this point, that is reason enough to keep building.