Tagged: ios
30 results
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.
Keepsafe
Keepsafe is a San Francisco privacy-software company that builds simple consumer apps for locking down personal data on phones. Its flagship Photo Vault - an encrypted locker for private photos and videos - grew to more than 75 million users, and the company has since expanded into a suite that includes App Lock, a private Browser with built-in VPN, and Unlisted burner phone numbers. Founded in 2012 by Zouhair Belkoura and Philipp Berner, Keepsafe's premise is that digital privacy should be as easy as closing a drawer.
Sekai
Sekai is a San Francisco Bay Area consumer platform where anyone can build software just by describing it. Users type a prompt and get a playable, shareable mini-app - a game, quiz, utility, poll or interactive story - in seconds, then play, remix and share what others make. Founded in 2024 by serial entrepreneur Lucky Zhang, Sekai (Japanese for 'world') began as an AI anime fan-fiction tool and pivoted into general-purpose app creation as AI coding models improved. By mid-2026 users had created more than 15 million mini-apps, with roughly 200,000 new ones a day, and the company had raised about $26 million across Seed and Series A rounds from Khosla Ventures, Connect Ventures, a16z speedrun, Mayfield and others.
Ad Hoc Labs (makers of Burner + Dialed)
Ad Hoc Labs is a Los Angeles-based independent mobile software company that builds communication tools giving people control over how they can be reached. Its flagship app, Burner, launched in 2012 as the original disposable second phone number - a privacy layer that lets users spin up, use, and delete alias numbers on demand. Its second product, Dialed, packages a business phone line, contact management, and marketing tools into one app for solopreneurs and micro-businesses. Founded by Greg Cohn and Will Carter, the company remains independent and remote, focused on utility and reliability over feature volume.
MixerBox
MixerBox is a Palo Alto-based super-apps company building a constellation of daily-essential mobile apps - from OnePlayer and FreecableTV to AlarmTunes, NewsDash and a suite of AI tools that became the largest single developer on the ChatGPT Plugin Store. Founded in 2012 by Taiwanese-Australian Harvard alum John Lai and backed by Y Combinator, the company has crossed 300 million downloads worldwide.
Raw Engineering
Raw Engineering is a San Francisco software products-and-services firm founded in 2007 that builds custom mobile apps, websites, SaaS products and cloud infrastructure for Fortune 500 enterprises, sports teams and startups. Best known as the lab that incubated and spun out the headless CMS pioneer Contentstack and the enterprise mobile platform Built.io (acquired by Software AG in 2018), the company today runs five centers of excellence and powers personalized Digital Fan Experience platforms for clients including the Sacramento Kings, Miami Heat and the NBA.
Benjamin Encz
Benjamin Encz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ashby, a San Francisco-based AI-native recruiting platform used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, and Snowflake. A German-born software engineer turned recruiting-infrastructure builder, he spent 80% of his time on recruiting operations as Director of Engineering at PlanGrid before co-founding Ashby in 2018. Under his leadership, Ashby has grown to 2,700+ customers, 380 employees, and $142.5M in total funding including a $50M Series D in 2025.
Fitbod
Fitbod is a San Francisco fitness company whose app builds personalized strength-training workouts using machine learning. It analyzes your training history, available equipment, and muscle recovery to generate a fresh, adaptive plan every time you walk into the gym - effectively a data-driven personal trainer in your pocket. Founded in 2015 by Allen Chen and Jesse Venticinque, Fitbod has grown to more than 5 million downloads, over 40 million logged workouts, and surpassed $20M in annual recurring revenue while remaining profitable.
Dave DeLong
Dave DeLong is a software craftsman with fifteen years of building iOS and macOS apps that ship on billions of devices - and, he likes to point out, some that run in outer space. A seven-year Apple veteran who worked on Siri, UIKit, Apple Maps, and Developer Evangelism, he led the WWDC app from 2013 to 2015 and helped ship the first releases of Swift, WatchKit, HomeKit, and HealthKit. He is among the top contributors of all time on Stack Overflow, a fixture of the Swift Evolution process, and the author of widely cited open-source libraries on calendrical math. He blogs at davedelong.com, speaks at conferences worldwide, and is currently building a stealth startup.
Federico Viticci
Federico Viticci is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, the Italy-based Apple publication he started in 2009 at age 21. He is best known for his book-length annual iOS and iPadOS reviews, his pioneering, almost evangelical insistence on using the iPad as his primary computer, and his deep work on Apple's Shortcuts automation. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast and several Relay FM shows including Connected, and runs the membership community Club MacStories.
John Sundell
John Sundell is a Swift and Rust developer, writer and podcaster who runs Swift by Sundell, a weekly publication of articles, tips, podcasts and videos read in well over a hundred countries. A former lead iOS developer at Spotify, he went indie to build apps, games and a stack of widely used open-source developer tools - including the static site generator Publish, the type-safe HTML DSL Plot, the Markdown parser Ink and the syntax highlighter Splash. He is based in Gdansk, Poland.
Ben Springwater
Ben Springwater is the Co-Founder and CEO of Matter, a beautifully designed reading app that consolidates articles, newsletters, and emails into one distraction-free experience. A Stanford MBA and former Nextdoor product lead, Ben built Matter through Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch and raised $9.15M from Google Ventures and others. Known for his philosophy that 'the details add up,' he steers Matter toward slow, steady growth for discerning readers rather than chasing scale - a conviction tested and hardened by personal health challenges in 2024 that led him to reimagine both his company and his life.
Luciq
Luciq (formerly Instabug, pronounced LOO-sik) is the San Francisco-based mobile observability company that pivoted in September 2025 from passive bug reporting to what it calls Agentic Mobile Observability - autonomous AI agents that detect, triage, and resolve issues across the mobile app lifecycle. The Y Combinator-backed company powers apps for DoorDash, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Decathlon, with more than 25,000 teams on its SDKs.
Ankit Kumar
Ankit Kumar is a software engineer and technical leader at Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based fintech building payment operations infrastructure for companies moving money at scale. With a Master's in Computer Science from Syracuse University, he built the foundations of Modern Treasury's full-stack Payments product - an integrated payment service provider (PSP) handling fiat and stablecoin payments across ACH, RTP, FedNow, and wire rails. Before payments, his career ranged from AR helmet prototypes for BMW's CES 2016 showcase to Android apps that earned the title 'The Ultimate Camera App' from the tech press.
The Mind Company
The Mind Company is the San Francisco-based mental fitness studio formerly known as Elevate Labs. It makes science-backed mobile apps - Elevate for cognitive training, Balance for personalized meditation, and the new Spark puzzle app - that have together crossed 80 million downloads and collected Apple's and Google's App of the Year honors.
Pocket Gems
Pocket Gems is a San Francisco mobile-games studio behind hits like War Dragons and Episode - Choose Your Story. Founded in 2009 by Daniel Terry and Harlan Crystal above a pizza shop while Terry was still at Stanford, the company builds AAA-quality mobile games and a Hollywood-grade interactive storytelling platform, powered by its proprietary mobile-first Mantis Engine and backed by Sequoia Capital and Tencent.
Polycam
Polycam is a cross-platform 3D scanning and spatial AI company that turns iPhones, Android phones, and drones into professional reality-capture tools. Used by architects, game studios, forensics teams, and millions of hobbyists, it combines LiDAR, photogrammetry, and Gaussian splatting to make 3D capture as easy as taking a photo.
Vivoo
Vivoo is a San Francisco-based health tech company that makes at-home urine test strips analyzed via smartphone camera. Founded in 2017, the company offers a wellness platform that measures 8+ biomarkers — including hydration, vitamins, minerals, pH, ketones, and oxidative stress — and delivers personalized nutrition and lifestyle recommendations through a free mobile app. Backed by $19.4M in funding led by Tim Draper, Vivoo is sold at Target, Walmart, and Sam's Club, and has expanded to 100+ countries with a focus on making lab-grade health insights accessible to everyday consumers.
Wispr Flow
Wispr Flow is a San Francisco-based AI voice dictation platform that converts natural speech into polished, formatted text across any application at roughly 220 words per minute - about 4x faster than typing. Built by two Stanford AI researchers, the company has quietly become the voice layer that 270 Fortune 500 companies rely on, combining a 10% word error rate (vs. 27% for OpenAI Whisper), 100+ language support, and context-aware formatting that automatically adjusts tone and style based on the active app. With $81M raised and a $700M valuation as of late 2025, Wispr Flow is racing to become the default voice-first operating system for a billion users.
Luke Kim
Luke Jinu Kim is the Founder and CEO of Liner, a San Francisco-based AI search engine used by over 12 million people across 220+ countries. Starting with $50,000 in seed money and a month on a Silicon Valley Airbnb, he turned a Chrome highlighter into the world's #2 AI search product — ranked four consecutive times on a16z's Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps list, with 2024 revenue up 341% year-over-year and $32M raised to date, including a $29M Series B backed by Samsung Venture Investment.
Raphael Schaad
Raphael Schaad is a Swiss designer-engineer and Visiting Partner at Y Combinator who built three generation-defining products: iA Writer (the minimalist writing app), Flipboard (the original social magazine), and Cron (acquired by Notion in 2022). Raised in the Swiss Alps, trained at MIT Media Lab, he brings a rare combination of technical depth and design taste that has made him a go-to mentor for founders navigating the AI era.
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.
Matt Birchler
Matt Birchler is a UX/UI product designer, tech blogger, YouTuber, indie app developer, and podcaster based in Illinois, USA. By day he designs at payments tech company NMI; by night he runs Birchtree - one of the longest-running independent Apple blogs on the internet, active since 2010 - and produces the 'A Better Computer' YouTube channel. He co-hosts the Comfort Zone podcast on MacStories, has built 8+ apps on the App Store, and operates a paid membership newsletter. His editorial independence is a point of pride: he never leaned on ads for income, keeping his voice authentically his own.
Natalia Panferova
Natalia Panferova is a Swift developer, author, and co-founder of Nil Coalescing - a technical education company built on the premise that understanding why SwiftUI works the way it does beats memorizing what it does. A former Apple SwiftUI Frameworks Engineer who was recruited after Apple discovered her blog, she personally built APIs (AttributedString, Markdown in Text, sheet detents) now used by millions of iOS developers daily. She publishes books, a blog, and the Nilcoalescing newsletter from a small town in New Zealand's wine country.
Paul Hudson
Paul Hudson is a British Swift developer, author, and educator based in Bath, England, best known as the creator of Hacking with Swift - the world's largest Swift tutorial site. With over 700,000 unique monthly visitors, 20+ books, and free courses like 100 Days of SwiftUI, he has taught hundreds of thousands of developers how to build iOS apps. A former tech journalist at Future Publishing, he invented FutureFolio for iPad publishing, then pivoted to become the go-to teacher for the Swift community - co-hosting the Swift over Coffee podcast, maintaining popular open-source projects like ControlRoom and Ignite, and raising over $40,000 for Black Girls Code through the Swift for Good charity anthology.
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.
Simon Støvring
Simon Støvring is a Danish indie iOS developer and principal iOS engineer at Framna, best known for creating Scriptable — the app that lets anyone automate their iPhone with JavaScript. By day he architects mobile apps for a Nordic agency; by night he ships beloved tools like Runestone (a Tree-sitter-powered text editor), Data Jar, and Jayson. His work sits at the intersection of power-user utility and delightful craftsmanship, earning him a loyal following among iOS enthusiasts, automation nerds, and developers worldwide.
Vincent Pradeilles
Vincent Pradeilles is a French iOS engineer and Swift educator based in Lyon, France. By day he is a Founding Solutions Engineer at Photoroom, the AI-powered photo editing app. By night (and weekends) he runs swiftwithvincent.com — a blog, newsletter, and YouTube channel that distills complex Swift patterns into bite-sized, practical tips. With 26,000+ Twitter followers, ~1,000-starred open source repos, and talks at FrenchKit, dotSwift, try! Swift Tokyo, NSSpain, and iOS Conf SG, he is one of the most recognized French voices in the global Swift community.
Kenneth Schlenker
Kenneth Schlenker is a French-American serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Opal, the #1 screen time and focus app on iOS. He first envisioned a focus app in 2008 while working at Google - it took him 11 years to actually build it. After founding art-tech company ArtList (acquired by artnet), launching Bird's Paris operations, and building a $10M ARR business with just 11 people, he also runs Open Scout, a weekly newsletter covering early-stage startups read by investors at Sequoia, YC, a16z, and Accel.
x1
x1 is the world's most powerful AI app studio, built for iOS. It replaces chaotic AI demo generators with a structured, end-to-end system that takes builders from raw idea to a production-ready App Store launch - generating native Swift and Xcode code, not throwaway prototypes. With modular studios for product design, branding, onboarding, monetization, and growth, x1 is what happens when someone finally takes AI-assisted app development seriously.