Phone Dipping app icon
Dip of the Month community voting
Choose a Dip Spot on the Vancouver Island map
Posting a new Dip
A Dip Spot's community photos

Inspiration

I live on Vancouver Island and I've always dunked my phone underwater in a case to get a photo nobody else was getting — a bear catching salmon, a fish clearing the surface, a shot from below the waterline. There wasn't anywhere to share those, or to find the good spots to try it. I built Phone Dipping to be that place: a community for anyone who has ever gotten their phone wet on purpose to grab a shot.

What it does

Phone Dipping is a free iPhone app for underwater and at-the-water photography.

Post a "Dip" — an underwater, surface, or aerial photo — tied to a real-world Spot.
Three categories, by where the SUBJECT is relative to the water, not the camera: Dipping (lens underwater), Surface Dip (at or breaking the waterline — a whale surfacing, a bird on the water), and Aerial Dip (subject fully above the water — not a drone shot).
Browse Dips by Spot, and vote on your favourites.
Sign in with Apple, or stay anonymous as a "New Dipper" — no email required either way.
Dip of the Month, a rotating community favourite.
Phone Dipping Pro (optional, auto-renewing): your own personal Dip map, a complete archive beyond the free three-item preview, a history chart by month and category, and CSV export of your dates, places, titles and votes.

How I built it

I'm not a programmer — I direct AI coding assistants and check their work against the real app, the same way I built Naughty Knitters. Phone Dipping is a native SwiftUI app with a Supabase (PostgreSQL) backend for Spots, Dips and moderation, Sign in with Apple for optional identity, and an auto-renewing Pro subscription sold through the App Store and managed with RevenueCat, which tracks the "pro" entitlement and drives the paywall's live pricing, trial eligibility and Restore Purchases. No EXIF, GPS or timestamp data is ever read from a posted photo — that metadata is stripped on import, and a Dip's location comes only from the poster's own choice, not the phone.

Challenges I ran into

App Review, twice. My first submission came back needing more information about a new developer account — I sent a screen recording and a written walkthrough of the app. The resubmission then hit an automated check for a missing Terms of Use link on the product page, which I fixed the same night. Approved September 29, 2026.
Keeping the "no fabricated content" promise. Every category, claim and legal document was checked line-by-line against the actual Swift code before it went in front of Apple or a user — including catching that the paywall's own benefit list, categories, and pricing all had to match what the app truly does, not what an earlier draft assumed.
A test post that needed to disappear cleanly. I kept one "Apple Review Moderation Test" post live in the database through review, at Apple's suggestion, then removed just that row once the app was approved — without touching the real Dips or the photo it shared with them.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Phone Dipping is live on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/phonedipping/id6802524626 Both of my Shipaton apps — Naughty Knitters and Phone Dipping — are now live before the deadline.

What I learned

The same lesson as Naughty Knitters, reinforced: never trust a claim, including your own AI's claim about your own code, until you've checked it against the primary source. The moderation and privacy choices (stripping metadata, no forced sign-in, a clean test-data cleanup) mattered more to getting this right than any single feature.

What's next for Phone Dipping

Real seed content from my own underwater and action-camera shots, growing the Spot list, and watching how the three Dip categories get used before considering anything like video.