Greg Gardner

@benmrosen I recommend signing up for the various events around WWDC before the tickets are gone. github.com/twostraws/wwdc is a good repo to watch to see when new events are added. See you there!

After applying every year since I got into iOS development over 10 years ago, I could not be more excited to attend my first WWDC!

@adamlyttleapps Time to shave my head

SEO prefers bearded bald men The algorithm has spoken

@stratechery @benthompson "paid them off by receiving cash-on-delivery from a computer shop in Mountain Valley." Typo here, it should be Mountain View, not Mountain Valley.

Apple's 50 Years of Integration Apple has survived 50 years by being the only company integrating hardware and software; if the company loses because of AI it will be because the point of integration changes. stratechery.com/2026/apples-50…

@myridiphis Thank you! I was struggling for hours to make this work well with animation and your solution works super well. Crazy how difficult this is to make it work well in SwiftUI.

link: nerdyak.tech/development/20…

Who would have thought animating views in a #SwiftUI Lists could be this tricky? 🤯 I cover it in my latest blog post 📰 (link in the comments) (thanks @DonnyWals for bringing this up🤜🤛)

My final #BuildInPublic post this week is an app that I think has the most potential. This is just an MVP, but with some polishing, I think it could be ready to release soon. I like to this of this app as "Claude Code meets Icon Composer". Last year Apple released a new tool called Icon Composer which you can use to create app icons that look at home in the new Apple liquid glass world. Icon Composer supports multiple layers and you can add SVGs or PNGs and put them together and add liquid glass 3D effects as well as other basic image tools like blending, opacity, fill and background colors, etc. To produce high quality app icons you should, of course, still hire a good designer. But for personal projects or placeholder icons, it is reasonable to get ChatGPT or any other image model to output decent icons. But this takes some iteration that can be cumbersome, especially if you are trying to make icons composed of multiple layers. That's where my new app comes in. It is similar to Claude Code in that you can chat with it (by voice or typing) and iterate on generating icons without dragging and dropping over and over. It is similar to working with a designer that gives you almost immediate results. If you've worked with LLMs to produce code or anything else, you know that when the output is good, it is totally amazing. And when it is bad, it can be super frustrating. Much of the effort on this project has been testing and iterating on it out to figure how to reduce frustration as much as possible by making sure that the LLM has all of the prompting and context available to make positive progress. Determining the right business model for this app is challenging. Using an LLM to generate icons, read existing icons, and all of the interaction eats through tokens quickly. The longer the conversation, the more it costs. In some of my testing it was pretty easy to spend a dollar or two per icon. One possible business model would be to offer consumable token packs so the user can pay as they go, but that adds ongoing friction and backend accounting. I could try a pricy subscription to cover the LLM costs, but it would have to be rate limited to avoid heavy users making me go bankrupt. The easiest model would be to have the user enter an API key so they are charged directly for the LLM costs as they go. Since the target market is developers, that is probably viable, at least initially. Icon Composer is only available on the Mac, but my app is a native Mac and iPad app. It is also great for people who aren't experts at Icon Composer because you can just describe the changes you want in plain English and the LLM can figure out what to do. In the attached video you can watch me iterating to make something similar to the Messages app icon in under 2 minutes.

My 3rd #BuildInPublic post this week might be a bit more boring than the others. It is a unique navigation app that I made for myself to scratch a very specific itch that I don't think most people have, so it isn't likely I will release it. I think most people just follow whatever route their chosen navigation app chooses for them every time. I do this when I'm unfamiliar with where I'm going. However, when I'm driving somewhere I'm very familiar with, I usually have preferred routes that I choose based on current traffic conditions. For instance, I need to drive downtown at least twice a week. From home I can take one of two freeways or drive through city streets if the freeways are congested. Without traffic, 101 is the fastest option, 280 is second, and driving through the Mission is the slowest. But there is often traffic. If I use Apple Maps or Google Maps to check their recommendations, they offer 3 different routes they have determined are the best options. But the options change and are sometimes really odd. I just wanted a way to see quickly if should I take 101, 280, or city streets based on current traffic. So I built an iOS app to answer this question. You just create a new trip and then add different routes using waypoints. Then the app checks Apple and Google Maps traffic conditions and lets me see the expected travel time for each route and which is currently the fastest. I've been using this app for a few months and it works well. I added a widget which I find to be the quickest way to glance at the different routes and choose which one I want to take. It has a button that opens your favorite navigation app to the fastest route. The Apple Maps directions API is free to use, but it gets throttled quickly when you ask for many different routes in a short period of time. This is pretty limiting if you want to set up multiple trips and have the traffic data be fairly up to date. The Google Maps directions API doesn't throttle, but every API call costs a fraction of a cent. There is a decent free tier before you are charged, though. This is fine for personal use, but the costs could add up if the app is used regularly by lots of people, especially the widget. So I have an app that solves my specific need, which is one I suspect not many other people have. And for those who do share my navigating preferences, I doubt this is something they would pay for on an ongoing basis. But in this age of AI-generated personal apps, that is perfectly fine with me.

Here is a link to the Apple Music-only version of WalkStar for those interested: itunes.apple.com/app/walkstar-m…

For my second #BuildInPublic post, I have an app that is actually done, but will probably never be released. To explain why, I will start by telling you about an app called WalkStar I released just over a year ago. It plays music, but only when you are walking. If you stop, the music stops. WalkStar was a super fun app to build, but it never got enough traction. I could have marketed it better, but frankly its retention was not what I expected. I hoped a fun, retro, motivational app that encourages people to get out and move would be stickier, but I guess not. WalkStar currently only works with Apple Music, which limits its potential audience quite a bit, but it should be able to find success within this limited audience as there are 10s of millions of Apple Music subscribers. This post, however, is about getting WalkStar to work with Spotify as well. There were many hurdles to jump over in order to get WalkStar working with Spotify. First off, playing music with Apple Music consists of making a few API calls built-in to iOS. Playing music with Spotify on iOS, however, is a serious technical challenge due mostly to iOS limitations. You can't just call out to Spotify to start playing music in the background like you can with Apple Music. You can only launch the Spotify app in the foreground and tell it to start playing music and jump back to your app. But then Spotify is in the background and has to play music to stay running. This was a problem for WalkStar because it only plays music while you are walking. So if it tells Spotify to pause music, the app will be killed by iOS. I solved this by publishing a 10 hour silent podcast on Spotify. So instead of telling Spotify to pause, it switches to the silent podcast. Spotify has an SDK that can be used to launch their app and send messages to the app on the device to play/update the music, but it is super flaky. So in WalkStar I used this SDK, but if it failed, I had to call the Spotify Web API as backup, which meant you had to be connected to the Internet. It took me weeks of testing, fixing and polishing to overcome all of the technical challenges in order to release it. Then came the biggest challenge of all: Spotify App Review. You might think Apple App Review is a nightmare (it is), but Spotify's is even worse. Apple's App Review used to take a week to review your app, and if anything was wrong, you had to resubmit and wait another week. Apple has reduced its review time to 1-2 days which is much improved. But Spotify? Their app review turnaround is 6 *weeks* minimum. If you get rejected, it is brutal. I first submitted WalkStar for Spotify integration review in early December 2024 hoping I could launch the app with both Spotify and Apple Music support in February. Long story short, my app was rejected twice and finally approved in... August. Eight months after my first submission. During the review, I found out that they will not allow any app that controls music on Spotify to monetize in any way. So if you want to play music on Spotify you can't make any money. No ads, no IAP, nothing. So my only option was to make a separate WalkStar for Spotify free app with no IAP. By this point, WalkStar had not taken off and I was working on other things. The idea of releasing WalkStar for Spotify as a separate app with no monetization, and a decent, but not flawless Spotify integration that would likely result in support requests from its few downloads was not appealing. So WalkStar for Spotify remains completed but unreleased to this day. Maybe someday I will just release one version of WalkStar with all features for free with support for both Apple Music and Spotify for fun. But from my #BuildInPublic posts this week you will see that I have many other projects I am working on. So we'll see.

So what do you think? Is this something worth pursuing? Let me know in the comments! I think this could be really useful as a CarPlay app. Apologies for the video quality. I couldn't capture the voice interaction and music with a screen recording.

I'm not sure if I'll end up releasing this. It's fun, but the voice-based APIs are not cheap to use (working with both OpenAI and Gemini), and I don't know if people are willing to pay money for this. I got it working with Apple Foundation Models framework (free), but it was a pretty poor experience.

For my first #BuildInPublic post, I have a fun one. What if you could have your own personal DJ that spins tracks for you based on how you were feeling at the moment, with minimal fuss? Just mention a mood, genre, vibe, whatever, and the music starts playing. Be sure to watch with the volume on.

So I'll try sharing a few things, and if any of them strikes your fancy, please don't be shy about commenting, liking, re-posting them, etc. I would really appreciate it. To give you an idea of the things I make, here is a link to my current apps. apps.apple.com/us/developer/c…

This week I am committed to posting each day about a non-released product I've been working on. In this new age of AI-driven development, creating prototypes has never been easier. This is a double-edged sword, and like many others I have (too?) many irons in the fire right now.

Hi. I'm Greg, an indie developer from San Francisco. I've released over 20 iOS and Mac apps in the last 12+ years. Since I'm a naturally introverted Gen-Xer, I've never tried this #BuildInPublic thing. But marketing has always been my Achilles' heel, so what the heck.

this is my cat. every day.

@Prince_Canuma Pocket TTS seems interesting if it can run CPU-only on iOS. Is that possible? A big issue with iOS on-device TTS running on GPU is that it will will crash if you background the app.

MLX-Audio-Swift v0.1.0 is here 🔥 The first native Swift SDK for on-device audio AI on Apple Silicon. 🗣️ TTS: Marvis, Pocket, Soprano, Qwen3-TTS (with streaming & voice design) 🎙️ STT: GLM ASR, Qwen3 ASR (with live transcription), Parakeet, Voxtral Realtime, LFM-2.5-Audio 🔊 STS: MossFormer2 speech enhancement, SAM Audio 🧠 VAD: Sortformer diarization, Smart Turn v3, Semantic VAD ✨ Highlights: •Modular SDK architecture •CLI tools for TTS & STT •Streaming audio playback •DACVAE codec •Configurable model cache •CI/CD pipeline Big shoutout to all contributors who made this possible: @lucasnewman @adrgrondin @INQTR @beshkenadze @ikenwoo @BenRacicot Get started today and leave us a ⭐️ github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-au…

@simonw I mean, have you ever seen a real pelican riding a bike without a top hat?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 really likes drawing top hats on its pelicans simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/17/cl…

@ioloro Not as a developer. As a user you can stop it on watchOS by disabling "mirror live activities" for the app in the Apple Watch app on your iPhone. This is not possible for CarPlay. Not sure about macOS.

Having a hard time finding the correct answer for this. Is it possible to disallow my iOS Live Activity making its way to macOS/watchOS/CarPlay? I know there's disfavored locations, which includes iPhoneWidgetsOnMac, but it seems not to listen to it.

@mufasaYC I received a similar email and totally thought it was legit and responded a bit and then one of my replies bounced and that's when I realized it was a scammer. Looks like they are using multiple different email addresses. Thanks for publicizing this more for others.

Don’t fall for this and I have a lot of respect to the scammer. He really really spent time on his tactic for the scam. Target indie app developers and pose as a YouTuber - very very very smart!

I’ve always looked at people who get scammed and thought, “How does that even happen, I’d never fall for it!” Today, I did. A very impressive scam actually. I’ve met @stephenrobles briefly before and we have mutuals here, so when I got an email from “him,” it didn’t really startle me, totally a possibility. I replied quickly, so did he. He offered to mention @thetaskapp in an upcoming roundup video for $100. That felt like a steal. Excellent price by the scammer - just believable enough to say yes without overthinking it! Next email - payment details (a crypto address). And somehow my brain was like “So convenient, I haven’t used my wallet in a while.” (Very stupid, I know) I sent the $100 🙃 He then followed up saying for another $100 he’d do a full dedicated video. That’s when the math finally stopped mathing! I checked with @mattcassinelli, and yep - definitely not Stephen. Lesson learned for $100 and honestly, worth it. tldr; I am officially the idiot I was so sure I’d never be :P