Fifteen apps have gone live on my App Store account since January. Here is the list, in order, and then what shipping at that pace as a one-person studio has taught me.
The timeline
- February 10 — My Mustang. A maintenance tracker for Mustang owners: service history, reminders, photos on every record, and an OBD scanner connection that reads diagnostic trouble codes. Case study.
- April 29 — Rutiera: Legi & Amenzi. The traffic edition of the Legi & Amenzi series, with six laws and ordinances in full text, from OUG 195/2002 to the taxi and ride-hailing rules.
- May 7 — BreathHold Coach. Dry apnea training for freedivers and spearfishers: guided CO₂ and O₂ tables, custom sessions, adaptive progression, haptic and audio cues, and optional Apple Health sync.
- May 15 — Foaie Parcurs. Digital trip logs for company fleets: vehicles, drivers, stops picked on a map, automatic consumption, monthly statistics and PDF or CSV export, with a PRO tier sold monthly, yearly or as a lifetime purchase.
- May 26 — BacIstorie. The first Bacalaureat app. Case study.
- August 2, 13 and 21 — Civio: Become Romanian, German and American. Citizenship test prep from official question catalogues, three exam formats, one shared core.
- August 25 to September 7 — six more Bac apps. Geografie, Matematica, Informatica, Romana, Biologie and Logica, described in the Bac series post.
- September 21 — Redobândire Permis Auto. Prep for the test you sit to recover a suspended licence. Launch notes.
Three families and three one-offs
Twelve of the fifteen belong to a family: seven Bac apps, three Civio editions, and two driver apps that join Categoria B from 2024. The other three, My Mustang, BreathHold Coach and Foaie Parcurs, are standalone products in categories I hadn't shipped in before. The families are where the pace comes from. The one-offs are where the new engineering comes from: OBD diagnostics, HealthKit and haptics, map-based stops and PDF export. Each one-off then feeds the shared kit that the next family is built on.
What made the pace possible
- One SwiftUI kit. Every app on the list is built on the same internal component library, with pinned versions and app-by-app upgrades, so a new app starts from working screens rather than from a blank project.
- No backend for almost everything. Progress lives on the device and subscriptions go through the App Store. There is no server to build, host or monitor, which is a deliberate constraint, not a gap.
- Templates inside families. Build one, ship it, extract the template from what survived. Civio and the Bac series were both done this way.
- Content from official sources. The BAMF catalogue, the USCIS civics questions, the Ministry of Education syllabus, the text of OUG 195/2002. Verified content takes longer to write than code, and it is the only kind worth shipping in an exam app.
- AI-assisted tooling. I use it to move faster, and every line is reviewed by me before it ships. It changed how quickly a first draft of a screen exists; it did not change who is responsible for it.
What it means if you're hiring
Fifteen launches in nine months means fifteen complete App Review cycles: listing, screenshots, privacy labels, in-app purchases, review, release. That process is routine for me, and it is the same one a client MVP goes through. If you want the shape of a typical engagement, the iOS MVP page describes it, and this post explains what moves the price.
What I'd do differently
Budget for content earlier. In every content-heavy app this year, the questions, theory and explanations took longer than the engineering, and I still under-estimated it at the start of each family. The code side of a template is a solved problem by the second app. The content side never is.
Fifteen apps in nine months is not the goal in itself. The goal is that each one solves a narrow problem well enough that someone finishes downloading it. The pace is just what happens when the engineering stops being the bottleneck.