Six iOS apps
None of them planned. Each one started with “how hard can that be?”, and each one I designed, built and shipped to the App Store on my own, outside of my day job.
- Role
- Everything: design, build, release
- Since
- 2025
- Where
- Berlin, outside of work
- Stack
- Swift, SwiftUI
Context
After years of Java backends I started building small iOS apps outside of work. Different stack, different constraints, same instinct: I don’t really understand something until I’ve built it.
Six of them are on the App Store today:
Split Bills with RoommateSplits shared household bills and expenses between roommates.
StadtrundfahrtGuided city sightseeing tours and points of interest.
Berlin HeuteLocal news, events and goings-on around Berlin, every day.
Steuerbelege ordnenKeeps tax receipts and documents organised.
Shift Plan ReminderTracks work shift schedules and reminds you before the next one.
Habit Builder Ganbaru!Helps you build daily habits and keep them.
Problem
Each app started with an everyday problem: splitting bills with roommates, finding your way around a city, keeping tax receipts in order, remembering the next shift. And with the same question: how hard can that be?
For a backend engineer the honest answer turned out to be: the code is the easy part.
Constraints
- One person. Design, build and release, all on my own.
- Free time only. The apps are built outside of my day job.
- A release process I don’t control. A human reviews the app before every release, on a timeline you can’t set, unlike a CI pipeline you own end to end.
What I did
- Learned to think in state. In SwiftUI a view is a function of its state: update the state, the view redraws itself. Closer to reactive backend patterns than I expected.
- Reused the backend instincts that carry over. Codable for JSON does the job Jackson does in Java, and URLSession is an HTTP client in a different outfit.
- Got signing and provisioning right, which took longer than any line of Swift.
- Shipped, six times, through App Store review, each app designed, built and released on my own.
- Took the same curiosity to Android: a small app in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, and a write-up of the Java habits that don’t quite carry over.
Result
apps on the App Store
person: design, build and release
of them planned
And a clear lesson for a backend engineer: the language and the UI paradigm were the easy part. The platform’s review and distribution model was the real learning curve.
Stack
- Swift
- SwiftUI
- Codable
- URLSession
- App Store
- Kotlin
- Jetpack Compose
Building software that has to work.
Open to senior backend roles in Berlin, hybrid or remote. Just as happy to talk distributed systems with no job attached.