Nine apps, one home
All my live apps now have a home on the web, along with a place to write about how they get made. Here's what's here and how it's built.
For a while, the only place you could see everything I’ve shipped was my App Store developer page. That’s fine for downloading an app, but it’s a bad place to tell the story behind one. So this site does both: it lists every app I have live, and it’s where I’ll write about building them.
What’s here
The Apps page lists everything you can download today, games and tools alike. Each app has its own page with screenshots, the latest release notes, and links to the App Store and Google Play where it’s available.
Writing is the blog. Posts can be tied to an app, so an app’s page also collects everything I’ve written about it.
Now is a short note on what I’m focused on at the moment.
How it’s built
The site is built to cost nothing and need almost no upkeep:
- Astro generates plain static HTML. There’s no server and almost no JavaScript.
- Posts are Markdown files in a Git repo. Writing a post means adding a file and pushing.
- App details come straight from the App Store. At build time, a small script asks Apple’s public lookup API for each app’s icon, screenshots, description, and latest version. A scheduled job rebuilds the site every week, so when I ship an update the page catches up on its own.
- Vercel hosts it and redeploys on every push.
What’s next
I’ll be writing about launches, betas, and the lessons from shipping apps on my own. If you want to follow along, there’s an RSS feed.