Fileika

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  Cover

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  AppIcon

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  Home

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  Paywall

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  New project

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  Canvas setup

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  Pattern editing

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  Reference image

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  Lasso tool

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  Project preview

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  Starting corner selection

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  Counter

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  Finished project

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  Artist patterns

Inspiration

Fileika started as a family project. We’re a husband-and-wife team, a developer and a designer, both into yarn, crafts, and making things by hand. I’ve always preferred knitting, while my wife loves crochet. I once thought about building a knitting app, but there were already enough row counters in the world. Then we got into filet crochet. Because the pattern is a grid, we had a different idea: what if the counter lived inside the pattern itself? You could see exactly where you are, move through it section by section, and come back tomorrow without trying to remember whether row 73 was done or not. That idea grew into Fileika: a place to create your own patterns, crochet them, keep what you make, and discover original designs by artists.

We’ve already started working with contemporary artists and designers on patterns made specifically for Fileika. We love the idea that a digital grid can carry someone’s visual style and eventually become a real object made by someone else’s hands.

What it does

Fileika is a native iOS app for creating and following filet crochet patterns. You can draw your own pattern, choose your starting corner and hand, and crochet directly from the grid. A visual counter follows you row by row and segment by segment, remembers your progress, and helps you pick up exactly where you stopped. You can also track time, save photos of finished pieces, sync projects between devices, and share patterns. We’re also building a collection of original artist-made patterns, so Fileika can be both a useful tool and a place to find something you actually want to make.

How we built it

We build Fileika together: I develop it, my wife designs it, and a lot of decisions are tested with an actual crochet project somewhere nearby. It’s built with Swift and UIKit. Metal powers the interactive grid, Core Data keeps projects available offline, Supabase handles sync, RevenueCat handles subscriptions, and Firebase helps us catch the weird things that only happen outside our own phones. We try to keep all of that invisible. The app should feel calm and simple enough to use while your hands are busy with yarn.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was realizing that a crochet counter needs to understand much more than a number. It has to know the row, direction, open and filled cells, starting corner, and which hand the maker uses. We also spent a lot of time on tiny interactions: how to move through a row, how to turn to the next one, how the canvas follows your position, and how to keep someone oriented on a large pattern. The less glamorous part was making undo, autosave, editing, and cloud sync all behave nicely together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that Fileika became a real tool. You can draw a pattern, crochet it, come back later, continue exactly where you stopped, and finally keep a photo of the finished piece next to the grid it came from. Seeing squares on a screen turn into something physical is still our favorite part. And now the first artist collaborations are already underway, which makes Fileika feel like the beginning of something bigger than the counter we originally set out to build.

What we learned

We learned how surprisingly hard it is to build a graphical crochet assistant that actually feels natural to use. It has to understand the structure of the pattern, follow the maker’s progress, react to direction and position, and still stay simple enough that the app never becomes the main activity. A lot of the work was finding that balance between guidance and interruption: showing the right thing at the right moment, keeping someone oriented in a large pattern, and making the digital layer feel connected to what their hands are doing. Building and using Fileika ourselves helped us refine that balance and made the product better with every real project we tried in it.

What's next for Fileika

We want Fileika to grow into a small home for the craft. That means more original patterns from artists, better tools for making your own, personal galleries of finished work, sharing, themed drops, collaborations, and eventually community events. We don’t want to turn crochet into another endless feed. We’d rather build something that helps people find an idea they love, put the phone down, and make it with their hands.

Built With

• core-data
• firebase
• metal
• mvvm
• revenuecat
• sign-in-with-apple
• storekit
• supabase
• swift
• uikit
• universal-links