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7 posts on ios.

Shipping a native iOS app as a web studio

Four of my apps are on the App Store, and every one of them compiled long before it shipped. SwiftUI is familiar for about a day, then six things stop working the way CSS taught you. The pipeline that gets a signed build onto somebody else's phone is the part nobody warns you about, including the rejection I could not fix in code.

A counselor directory on iOS: what moved to the phone

The boundary between a web directory and its iPhone app is a decision about what deserves to travel. Mine let 589 verified providers cross, in four public JSON files, with the crisis numbers compiled into the binary so they survive with no signal. It left behind the unclaimed license records, the ranking, the accounts, the analytics, and any reason to ask where you are.

One button, no reading, no login: designing panic.btn

There is no account to make, no menu to open and no paragraph to read. Press the one shape on the screen and it becomes a breathing pacer, vibrating on each phase change so the pace can be followed with your eyes shut. This is what that press does, where a counselor's vocabulary shows up in the interface, and where the app stops.

iLovable: a box of therapy tools that stays on the phone

A parts map, a CBT chain, a mood check-in and a day count, in an app that downloads at 13.5 MB and sends nothing to me. The exercises came off paper I handed people in a counseling room for ten years. Most of the design work was deciding what the screen would refuse to do.

What on-device AI costs: a voice journal at 813.4 MB

Mutterly runs on an iPhone XS, a phone from 2018, because its language model rides inside the download. Apple's own on-device model ships almost nothing extra and starts at the iPhone 15 Pro. Five model years of phones sit between those two floors, and that gap is the whole reason for the size.

Finding a counselor in Oregon

A person looking for a therapist has one word for the problem, the name of a town, and about a minute of patience. Here is what ORCounselors.com does with that: one search box, a five-minute wizard, four access filters, and a ranking that sorts by verification first and locality second, until somebody asks to be seen in person.

Three small iOS apps, and what each of them taught me

Three small iOS apps, one of them 340 times the size of the smallest, and all three declare the same thing on the store: data not collected. The spread between those numbers is the price of keeping a promise on the device, and it is the most useful thing I took out of building them.

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