app-development
(14)
Daniel Haiem and the $140 Question
A school calculator sent Daniel Haiem looking for a cheaper answer. ClassCalc taught the AppMakers USA founder how much software depends on the people willing to trust it.
David Adkin and the trouble with a convincing mockup
His designs looked real enough to fool his colleagues. David Adkin co-founded Adalo to close the distance between drawing an app and making one work.
Phantom Design Doesn’t Make Park Benches. Brush Holders? Yes.
The California agency builds brands, online stores and software. Its own wooden brush holder offers a surprisingly good explanation of how those jobs belong together.
Lovely’s big-name portfolio began with a small-budget idea
The Los Angeles agency lists work for Angela Bassett, Issa Rae and Nicki Minaj. Its founding pitch was closer to Main Street: give charities and small businesses access to professional design without five-figure budgets.
Konsult’s best feature was knowing what to leave out
The San Francisco software consultancy brought Apple experience to startup budgets. Its most useful lesson came from a client tool that needed only two permission levels.
Builder.ai promised apps on demand. Then the money ran out.
An AI assistant, reusable code and human developers were supposed to make custom software easy to order. Builder.ai’s collapse exposed how much depended on the people, the promises and the cash behind the screen.
Adalo
Adalo is a no-code platform that lets anyone design, build, and publish database-driven native mobile apps and web apps - straight to the Apple App Store and Google Play - using a drag-and-drop visual canvas and AI-assisted building, without writing code. Founded in 2018 by David Adkin, Ben Haefele, and Jeremy Blalock and based in St. Louis, Missouri, Adalo has grown to hundreds of thousands of registered makers and now offers flat-rate pricing that stays fixed regardless of app usage.
Onymos
Onymos is a Palo Alto software company that sells enterprises pre-built application features and data-processing modules instead of finished apps. Its Features-as-a-Service model bundles UI, backend logic, and cloud functions - login, chat, biometrics, storage - into drop-in components, all built on a self-described 'no-data architecture' where Onymos never captures or stores customer data. In recent years the company has focused its intake and AI tooling (DocKnow, LabFlow, SmartSync, DeviceFlow) on healthcare and life sciences, automating the document and data intake that clinical and diagnostic labs handle every day.
Greg Cohn
Greg Cohn is the co-founder and CEO of Ad Hoc Labs, the Los Angeles product studio behind Burner, the app that pioneered disposable, on-demand phone numbers back in 2012. A former Yahoo product leader who spent his early career in book publishing and content strategy, Cohn built Burner after his first app failed, turning that stumble into a durable, privacy-focused business that has outlived most of its venture-funded peers. He is an advocate for building consumer apps that deliver lasting value over chasing hypergrowth.
David DeRemer
David DeRemer is the founder and CEO of Very Good Ventures (VGV), the product and venture studio that built the Hamilton app - the first large-scale commercial Flutter app shipped outside of Google. With nearly two decades spanning Accenture, frog design, Chobani, and his mobile agency Posse, DeRemer bet the company on Google's then-pre-alpha Flutter framework and turned VGV into one of the most influential consultancies in the Flutter ecosystem, helping enterprises ship high-quality apps from a single codebase.
Very Good Ventures
Very Good Ventures is the world's first and largest Flutter development agency. Founded in 2018 after building the first commercial Flutter app for the musical Hamilton, the fully remote firm helps mid-market and enterprise brands ship beautiful, production-ready apps for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. VGV is trusted by Google to build flagship Flutter products and maintains widely used open source tooling like Very Good CLI and Dart Frog.
Alex Greaves
Alex Greaves is the Co-Founder and CTO of FlutterFlow, a visual low-code/AI-powered app development platform he co-founded in 2020 alongside fellow ex-Googler Abel Mengistu. Built on Google's Flutter framework, FlutterFlow has grown to serve over 2 million users across 200+ countries, backed by $25.5M in Series A funding led by GV and Gradient Ventures at a ~$170M valuation. A Stanford physics and CS grad who honed his craft on Google Maps' machine learning team, Greaves now leads a platform that lets developers and non-developers alike ship native iOS, Android, and web apps in a fraction of traditional development time.
Marco Arment
Marco Arment is an independent iOS developer, podcaster, and blogger best known for building Overcast (a leading podcast app), co-founding Tumblr, and creating Instapaper. He co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP) with John Siracusa and Casey Liss, and writes at marco.org. His career is defined by principled solo craftsmanship - he operates Overcast entirely alone with no investors or employees, maintains a fierce privacy stance in his apps, and is famous for once pulling a #1 App Store app (Peace) after 36 hours on ethical grounds.
Riley Testut
Riley Testut is an American indie iOS developer best known for creating GBA4iOS, Delta, and AltStore - tools that collectively redefined what's possible outside Apple's walled garden. Starting at age 13 with a Game Boy emulator built from scratch using Microsoft Paint graphics, Riley spent a decade fighting Apple's restrictions before seeing Delta hit #1 on the App Store in 2024 and launching the first EU-approved third-party iOS marketplace. His work forced Apple to change its App Store rules - twice - without a single lobbyist, just relentless building.