Background

Hey ho! My name is Uladz and I’m writing my first iOS application. Last week, my laptop got drenched by water from a baby bottle and refused to turn on. So, for the next couple of weeks, since I can’t code, I’ll be writing posts instead…

For the past few years, I’ve been constantly thinking about starting something of my own, dreaming of working for myself. The criteria for a new venture were a few, namely the ability to engage in it in my spare time, having the necessary skills or the desire to learn, minimal financial investment, and the potential to see initial results within six months. The ideas were quite varied, ranging from dropshipping or a print-on-demand T-shirt store to my own cafe or a children’s toy store. Many ideas were dismissed as boring, but mostly due to the fear that something might not work out.

Two years ago, I became a father and we downloaded an app to track the activities of our growing baby. I don’t remember the name anymore, but it served its purpose. The only issue was that some features, which imho should have been free, were only available with a subscription. So, I thought, why not quickly put together my own app?

I liked the idea because it met all the criteria: I could code for 1–2 hours a day, I wanted to learn mobile development, no funds were required (not entirely true, I’ll explain in the next parts), and six months seemed feasible. I didn’t plan to sell it; the main idea was learning and personal use. I also wanted to streamline the release process, i.e., to be able to make changes and release new versions quickly. In the future, if all went well, I could try to monetize it and have some passive income, which would be nice. And so, at night, sitting on a fitness ball, rocking my daughter with one hand and typing with the other, I started coding.

The first thing was to decide what to write and for which platform. I decided not to limit myself to just iOS, as I couldn’t leave Android smartphone owners without the opportunity to use my wonderful creation. So, I was choosing between React Native and Flutter. For work, I needed to learn React to support an internal service, and I decided that it was a good argument in favor of React Native. I started, as expected, with the official documentation and tried to launch Hello World sample in the simulator, but it didn’t go as smoothly as I expected. The process of setting up the environment was so clumsy that my motivation quickly plummeted. Dependencies didn’t want to install, the simulator didn’t want to run or crashed without apparent reason. Also, the app release process was unclear to me, and after struggling for 2–3 weeks, I abandoned the idea. Besides, our child’s routine had settled, and we stopped using even the paid app.

Nine months passed, we moved to another city, and I joined a gym. I had tried before, but never stuck with it for long. This time, the gym was a 2-minute walk away, so the likelihood of skipping was minimal. I started looking for an app to log sets and weights and found there were many. One of the first I came across suited me, but over time, I again found that I needed a subscription to comment on all exercises, not just one per session, and I couldn’t create more than three routines.

For the record, I believe you should pay for any service one way or another: watch ads, subscribe, or accept that your data is sold. The issue here was that much of the functionality available with a subscription was unnecessary for me, and what I needed was artificially limited with the sole purpose of forcing me to buy something I didn’t need.

Thus, I returned to the idea of my own app and the question of what to write it in. This time, I decided to take the path of least resistance — start small, learn fast. Considering that I was writing primarily for myself, I decided to limit support to iOS. The entry threshold was very low; I started with Apple’s official tutorials and within the first two hours, I loaded a test app onto my phone. So, in the evenings after my main job, I began working on yet another workoutlogger 💪.

That’s all for now, thanks to everyone who read to the end!

In the next posts, I’ll write about:

• development process and why I decided not to learn Swift, but to ask ChatGPT
• first release and
• future plans

You can see screenshots or download it here. It’s free, with no ads or registration needed.