app-store
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Takeaways Took Two Months to Reach the App Store
William Sayer built Takeaways V1 with Create, Anything’s predecessor, and launched in June 2025, according to Anything. His two-month journey offers founders a more useful planning reference than a stopwatch on code generation.
Anything Can Build Your App. Apple Still Holds the Keys.
Anything’s App Store dispute exposes the gap between making an app and getting it into users’ hands. The current iPhone and Android workflows show exactly where the builder’s work ends and the owner’s launch begins.
Apple Sells You a Smaller World, and You Keep Buying It
It started in a garage and now runs on custom silicon, a services machine, and a billion-plus devices that all talk to each other. Here is how the walled garden actually works - and why leaving it feels like moving countries.
How Jake Built 'Early,' the Push-Up Alarm App Making $50,000 a Month
In this Starter Story episode, host Pat Walls interviews Jake, a 24-year-old self-taught developer and former accountant who built 'Early,' an iPhone alarm clock app where you must do push-ups to turn off your alarm. Launched at the end of 2025, the app went from zero to over $50,000 a month in just four months, racking up more than 200,000 downloads. Jake breaks down how he found and validated the idea, why he shipped an MVP in 19 days, how iOS 26's AlarmKit API made a reliable alarm app possible, and why influencer marketing and top-of-funnel views were the true secret to his growth.
Curtsy
Curtsy is a mobile-first, peer-to-peer resale marketplace where Gen Z and young millennial women buy and sell secondhand clothing, shoes and accessories. Founded in 2016 and originally a dress-rental service, it pivoted to resale and built its edge around making listing fast for casual sellers - using machine learning to suggest prices, fill in item details and estimate shipping weight, backed by human review. Sellers keep more of their money than on rival platforms (a ~19-20% commission), buyers save up to 70% on brands like Lululemon, Free People and SKIMS, and the app carries a 4.8-star rating across tens of thousands of reviews. Curtsy raised an $11M Series A led by Index Ventures in January 2021, part of $14.5M total funding.
Mentra
Mentra is a San Francisco startup building MentraOS, an open-source operating system and app store for smart glasses, alongside Mentra Live, a 43-gram AI camera-glasses device. Founded in 2024 by MIT-dropout Cayden Pierce and Alex Israelov after they collaborated on the OpenSourceSmartGlasses project, Mentra wants to be the Android of smart glasses - a neutral software layer that lets developers ship apps and lets people actually use the hardware in the real world.
Uptodown
Uptodown is one of the world's largest independent, multi-platform app stores, founded in 2002 in Malaga, Spain. It distributes Android APKs (and historically Windows software) directly to users as an alternative to Google Play, offering older app versions, region-free access, and editorially curated listings. Bootstrapped and profitable on web advertising rather than venture capital, it serves well over a hundred million monthly users and hundreds of millions of downloads while championing software sovereignty and user choice.
Anything starts where the demo stops.
An AI app builder learned that generating code was only the beginning. The real work was getting ordinary people all the way to a product someone could use - and pay for.
Saad Umar
Saad Umar is the founder and lead engineer of Appzay, a mobile app development agency that turns funded startup ideas into shipped iOS and Android products. Working out of Karachi with a globally distributed team, he positions himself less as a vendor and more as a technical co-founder, owning everything from product strategy and native Swift/Kotlin engineering to App Store deployment. His shop has built and shaped apps used by millions, including the official Inter Miami CF app and the driving-rewards app OnMyWay.
Curtis Herbert
Curtis Herbert is an independent iOS developer and the solo founder behind Slopes, the Apple Design Award-winning app skiers and snowboarders use to track their days on the mountain. He spent nine years growing it from a $10,600 side project into a million-dollar business, documenting every revenue chart and hard lesson in public through his Slopes Diaries and Slopes Dev newsletter. He runs Breakpoint Studio out of Boulder, Colorado, and treats indie app development like a craft, taking cues from web businesses rather than other apps.
Luis Garrido
Luis Hernandez Garrido is the co-founder and CEO of Uptodown, the world's largest alternative app store, which he launched in 2002 as a university project in Malaga, Spain. Over two decades he has grown it into a platform with 130 million monthly active users and 450 million APK downloads per month - all without a single outside investor. Now based in Berkeley, California, he champions open internet principles, device neutrality, and democratized software distribution, and is an active voice in the Coalition for App Fairness pushing back against Google and Apple's app store dominance.
Babar Ahmed
Babar Ahmed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mindstorm Studios, Pakistan's pioneering independent mobile game studio behind 1 billion+ downloads and global chart-toppers like Hexa Sort. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who quit a Silicon Valley circuit engineering career to return to Pakistan and build a gaming company from the ground up, he has transformed a startup funded by his father into a 150-person studio with 2 million daily active users, while also co-founding M-Labs (a game development accelerator) and serving as head of strategy at AppLovin's Lion Studios.
Josh Elman
Josh Elman is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader and investor who helped grow Twitter nearly 10x, launched Facebook Connect, and backed foundational consumer products like Discord and Musical.ly at Greylock Partners. Currently Director of Product Management at Apple focused on App Store discovery, he is best known for his 'only metric that matters' framework - the idea that great products are defined by a core action users perform at a predictable frequency, not vanity metrics.