Simon
Støvring

The Developer Who Gave Your iPhone a Script Engine

There's a particular kind of stubbornness that separates the craftsmen from the consumers. Simon Støvring has it in abundance. While most developers clock out at five and consider that enough, Støvring goes home, makes a coffee - a proper espresso, not the instant kind - and builds tools that tens of thousands of people use every day.

He is best known for Scriptable, the iOS app that does something Apple never officially sanctioned: it lets anyone write JavaScript that talks directly to the operating system. Calendar. Reminders. Contacts. Photos. Siri. The file system. Home screen widgets. All of it, scriptable, all of it open to anyone with an idea and a few minutes to spare. When iOS 14 shipped with widget support in 2020, Scriptable's community exploded. Gizmodo called it "by far the best iOS 14 app out there."

That's quite a headline for an app a Danish developer built in his spare time starting in February 2018.

A Computer Repair Shop and an iPhone 3GS

Simon Binderup Støvring grew up in Denmark, the son of a man who ran a computer repair shop. He didn't inherit a company. He inherited curiosity. The shop fixed computers, game consoles, whatever people brought through the door. Simon absorbed the language of machines before he had words for it.

In 2009, he got an iPhone 3GS and a MacBook Pro. He had been writing code before, but touch interfaces were different. The idea that you could build software people manipulated with their hands - not keyboards - felt like the future arriving slightly ahead of schedule. "The thought of building software that you could manipulate with touch input was extremely intriguing," he has said.

His first app wasn't a grand vision. It was a festival schedule. He attended a Danish music festival every year and kept losing the paper program. So he built an electronic version. The festival bought it. He maintained it for three years. He even built an Android version. It wasn't a startup. It was a craftsman finding his first paying customer.

The Scriptable Gamble That Paid Off

Støvring started building Scriptable in February 2018. At the time, he was nervous. Workflow - later acquired and relaunched by Apple as Shortcuts - already existed. Building an automation tool for iOS felt like running directly at a competitor with considerably more resources.

Then Apple announced WWDC 2018. Workflow became Shortcuts. And instead of a competitor, Støvring suddenly had a companion opportunity. Apple's new Shortcuts custom intents API meant Scriptable could be the thing that Shortcuts called when it needed actual JavaScript logic. The market didn't close - it opened.

He shipped Scriptable on September 18-21, 2018. The philosophy was simple and radical at the same time: no sandboxing of Apple's APIs, no intermediary layer, no dumbed-down abstraction. "I prefer to proxy APIs directly from JavaScript to Apple's APIs," he has said. Give developers the real thing. Trust them to use it well.

The community did the rest. Thousands of scripts. Hundreds of community widgets. A GitHub repository called "awesome-scriptable" that lists community contributions the way awesome-react lists components. Støvring's pollen count Siri script - built because he has seasonal allergies and didn't want to open an app to find out if his eyes would survive the day - became a signature demonstration of what the app could do.

Runestone: Earning a Daring Fireball Mention

In 2022, Støvring shipped Runestone, a text and code editor for iPhone and iPad built on top of an open-source Swift framework of the same name. It uses Tree-sitter for incremental syntax highlighting - the same approach used by some of the most sophisticated code editors on desktop. It supports 25+ programming languages and is fast in ways that most iOS text editors are not.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball called it "fast and intuitive" and noted that its $10 Premium upgrade unlock had "one of the best Easter eggs" he'd encountered in years. MacStories gave it a full review. The open-source Runestone framework on GitHub has earned over 3,100 stars.

It's worth pausing here to appreciate the shape of this. A developer, working evenings and weekends, ships a text editor that impresses one of the most demanding Apple critics on the internet, with a hidden joke good enough to get called out specifically. That's not luck. That's craft with a sense of humor baked in.

The Nine-to-Five Indie

Støvring is refreshingly clear about something most indie developers obscure: he is not a full-time indie developer. He has a real job. He is currently Principal iOS Engineer at Framna, a Nordic mobile agency formed from the merger of Shape and Bontouch. Before that: Lunar (a challenger bank), Be My Eyes (accessibility software), Robocat (a Copenhagen product studio). A proper career, built with seriousness.

His apps come from the margins: "1-4 hours of evening and weekend time," as he has described it. He takes two or three deliberate week-long breaks per year to prevent burnout. He knows what sustainable looks like and he's chosen it over the startup hustle. The apps he ships are polished because they were built slowly, with attention, not under funding deadlines.

The distribution philosophy is equally thoughtful. Festivitas for Mac is sold via Gumroad rather than the Mac App Store - 10% cut instead of 30%, and full control over APIs, update schedules, and customer relationships. It's not anti-Apple. It's pro-independence.

On AI: Ready to Adapt, Not Ready to Surrender

In a world where every developer opinion on AI collapses into either uncritical enthusiasm or theatrical alarm, Støvring has found a third lane: measured, specific, and personal. He uses AI coding tools. He writes about them on his blog. He published a guide to using Claude with Xcode 26 in June 2025. He built a mobile setup using Tailscale, tmux, Prompt SSH, and his own brrr notification app to access AI coding agents from his iPhone.

And then he says this: "But make sure you understand what you ship and can stand behind its quality. I'm ready to adapt but I'm not ready to give up control."

For an indie developer whose entire reputation rests on shipping things that work exactly as described, this is not a hedge. It's a load-bearing beam.

Brewer, Builder, Gamer

His GitHub bio describes him as an "aspiring home brewer, brewing both beers and espressos." He builds LEGO sets. He plays Nintendo Switch. His blog once featured a Mint Mojito Iced Coffee recipe alongside iOS development tutorials - not as a brand move, but because he made something good and wanted to share it.

Most of his friends work in software. They have "hobby hacking sessions" together - collaborative evenings building things that probably don't need to exist but absolutely should. This is the world Støvring inhabits: professional enough to ship conference talks on dependency injection, human enough to publish a coffee recipe and a macOS app that lets you smash your screen with a broom.

SmashSmash - the screen-smashing Mac app teased in January 2025 - is perhaps the best encapsulation of his sensibility. It's technically sophisticated, utterly pointless, and exactly the kind of thing that makes you love the developer who made it. Accelerated Input, an AI text enhancement tool for macOS teased in May 2025, shows the other side: practical, useful, aimed at solving real problems in real workflows.

He holds both modes simultaneously without apparent contradiction.