Inspiration… a lot of people including myself have used Polaroids and super 8 but it is a hobby and hobbies are expensive sometimes. This app will allow you to take Polaroids and keep them on your phone/icloud.
What it does… it replaces Polaroids expensive cost of buying a camera and a lot of film. You can buy film when you want instead of wasting a bunch on lost bad shots.
How we built it.. I used Xcode with some Claude cowork. I used a bit of Gemini to scale some photos I’d draw using procreate but I also used procreate to create a lot of the assets such as the film borders and some of the icons.
Challenges we ran into. When I had Claude help it seemed to make it mostly built around iOS 26 and 27 so it was not optimized for older devices and devices not on 26 or 27. iOS 18 worked part of the time. We also ran into animation problems since creating a video in procreate doesn’t one for one go into swift for the app. I also had issues with paying the 99 dollars for apples TestFlight program
Accomplishments that we're proud of. I have a total of 80 testers and with the help of them I was able to iron out some bugs including getting it to work on old devices and now working on 8mm recording. This is also my first ever app I’ve made.
What we learned. Ai can be useful and it’s a hammer, not every tool in your tool belt. Ai becomes an assistant not the worker. This also gave me the feeling that I can make more apps with more good ideas. And I learned that procreate is amazing for asset making
What's next for MellonPics. Iron out more bugs, add some features, and get approval on the App Store with possibility of monetization
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