Three Simple Apps, or: Am I a Developer Now?
What is Apple's one enduring advantage that keeps me coming back despite years of bad decisions, functionality rot, and increasingly aggressive rent-seeking? I've tried Android. I've tried Linux. I want to love them and to hate Apple, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Why? Because Apple is still the undisputed king of default apps.
Apple's bundled apps — Notes, Mail, etc. — do something that no other software, paid or free, seems to be able to do. They execute one task at a time with clarity and restraint, and they do so in a way that respects and thoroughly avails itself of the system they live inside. When I open Reminders, I know exactly what it's for: to just write down some reminders, and then have them appear in Calendar, too. All these system apps follow the same philosophy. Each one does its job simply and reliably, yet together they form something greater than the sum of their parts.
But there are vast domains of everyday life that these apps don't cover — domains where I spend a lot of time and have long wished for tools with the same care, focus, and aesthetic discipline.
As we've now entered the era of suddenly accessible software development, I decided I could build them myself. And now, half a year later, I have. There are real, functioning apps out there on the App Store that fulfill my brief.
Simple Art Scanner is a hub for saving all the artwork you see at galleries and museums. For years, I used a clumsy Notes flow: scan a painting with the document scanner, crop it, drop the image into a note with the wall label and the location. I always felt that a simple app, structured around a dedicated artwork library where you could natively add the requisite details (artist, title, year, etc.), would be a much more intuitive way to go about this. Turns out, it is.
Simple Film Search, which I've just released, is my largest app and offers the core functionality of all your favorite film sites, but without the visual noise, ads, and proprietary UX contortions. You search for a film, get the information you're actually looking for, and, if you want, wander outward through cast and crew connections to discover what to watch next.
And soon, my third tool, a Simple Coffee Timer (and ratio calculator) will round out this first trio.
I'm proud of all of these apps, and I use them constantly. That's the core incentive: build great tools that I want to exist. This guiding light helped a lot during development, like when I was confronted with how absurdly time consuming it is to capture localized screenshots for every app on every platform in every supported language. Or when I realized the API terms undergirding Simple Film Search meant it would have to be released for free, meaning I couldn't square my time investment. Oh well, so be it. These are apps I want in the world, so they should be in the world. I'm making sure they are. And if you want to use these apps, too, then that makes me even happier.
They all do one thing, do it elegantly, and then get out of the way. Just like an Apple default app would.
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So, am I a developer now? Technically, yes. I definitely pay the yearly $99 to Apple that says I am. But the question is becoming a bit like asking someone if they're a gentleman. Once a meaningful marker of class and distinction; now a generic encompassing everyone. That's where we're going: every man a developer.
Coding and the hard manual work of handcrafting software is rapidly becoming old-fashioned. In the near future, spinning up your own utilities with your own preferred UX will be as ordinary as making a spreadsheet. As Stephane Derosiaux wrote recently, "Your SaaS is now my weekend project."
I'm living that shift firsthand. All of the Simple apps were built with extensive help from Claude Code and other agentic tools. The knee-jerk response is, of course, that I'm not a programmer at all; I'm just a model wrangler. Fine. This distinction is all but moot. My ideas have been instantiated — willed into existence — and are now on the App Store. I am making real money (as in, "extant," not "loadsa") from these things that would not exist had I not decided they should. I was able to leverage my tastes and preferences with a depth and specificity that no first-year developer otherwise could.
It's a small preview of a broader change: software returning to the scale of individual needs. My apps won't replace the venture-backed giants, and they aren't meant to. They are digital craftsmanship for an audience of one (or perhaps a few like-minded friends, like you).
So: If you have an idea for a tool that would make your day 1% better, stop waiting for someone else to build it. The tools are ready. Are you?