The plan at the start of the year was pretty simple: ship one good iOS app and rewrite this site. Six months in, there are four apps in flight, a café SaaS taking shape on the side, and a site that landed more solidly than I expected. It all moved a little faster than I planned, so I wanted to write this down while the memory was still fresh.
What surprised me most was how often the real character of each app emerged by the second or third week. PrismaFX is, at heart, a calculator with a portfolio layer on top. SoruX is a question generator with a study experience woven around it. MotiveX is HealthKit with coaching logic inside. If by week three I could describe the app in one sentence, every later decision flowed easier. When that definition stayed fuzzy, most of my time went into rewriting flows nobody had really asked for.
The hardest part was never writing new code. The real grind was the boring infrastructure that doesn't look like the product but is what actually ships it: subscription receipts, legal pages that don't quite mean what they say, account deletion flows designed to clear App Review without a fight, error tracking that surfaces without drowning the user. Every app shipped late by exactly the time that pulled out of it. If I'd built one solid scaffold up front and reused it, every one of them would have been live earlier.
That's roughly what I'm focused on now: turning the small templates and primitives I keep copy-pasting across projects into something actually shareable. Telemetry gates, legal doc generators, glow primitives — if a piece has worked for me four times, it'll probably make someone else's life easier at least once.