Playwall: your game backlog, minus the guilt

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  Your games, not your guilt. The wall is the whole app: sharp is yours, blurred is a suggestion, no shame counter anywhere.

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  Every finish becomes a star. The galaxy holds only games you completed, so unlike a stats page it can only grow.

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  Tonight, not someday. One game worth starting now, not another list to scroll.

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  Log a night in one tap. No timer, no diary, just a mark that you played.

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  Rate a finish in two questions. No five-star form, just "better than?" until it lands.

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  December gets a receipt. A plain, shareable record of your year. A keepsake, not a leaderboard.

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Inspiration

Every backlog app keeps score against you: a badge counting what you have not finished, a streak you can break, a "you have not played in 6 days." The pile becomes a debt and the app becomes the debt collector.

Playwall started with one question. What is left of a backlog app once you delete every part built to make you feel behind?

What it does

Playwall is a wall of the games you love, not a list of what you owe. Hear about a game in a video or a thread and share it straight into Playwall from the share sheet, no typing at a desk. From there: log a night in one tap, rate a finish in two questions, and watch every game you finish become a star in a galaxy that only ever grows.

Nothing is locked. The whole app is free, so there is no crippled tier. And nothing leaves your phone: no account, no server copy. Your library syncs through your own private iCloud, which even we cannot read.

Everything we deleted, we replaced:

One control runs everything: a pill in the thumb zone that morphs into search, capture, Tonight, and the galaxy. No tabs, no menus.

Blur means "not yours." Own a game and its cover is sharp; a suggestion stays blurred. To add one you press and hold, and the blur melts off under your thumb as the ring fills. You can feel ownership happen. Colour means something too: green is what is true of a game, indigo is what you can do about it.

The haptics have rules, and the bans are the point. Nothing near a price, because a buzz next to money is manipulation. Nothing for navigation. Never a nag, because there is no streak to nag about.

How we built it

SwiftUI on iOS 18.6, SwiftData, Swift Testing. No Swift Charts, no TabView, no system sheets: the wall, pill, galaxy, and receipt are all hand-built. Ten languages, iPhone and iPad. Game data and covers come from IGDB through a Cloudflare Workers proxy that caches results and keeps the API key off the device.

Capture at the moment of discovery is a Share Extension: share a link or title from any app and it lands in a shared App Group container, so the game is waiting the next time you open the wall. That is the one place every other backlog makes you stop and type at a desk.

Your library lives in your own private CloudKit database that syncs across your devices and that we cannot read. Delete everything wipes the local copy and the iCloud one with it.

RevenueCat runs Night Owl, the optional patronage: one entitlement across an annual and two lifetime tiers, restoring across reinstalls and devices with no sign-in. It never gates anything, because nothing is gated.

Challenges we ran into

The bet was deleting the list, the spreadsheet every backlog app really is. A list is how everyone else lets you find a game, so the wall had to earn the trade: pinch to widen from "just mine" to "everything," a minimap to hold your place, and Tonight, which answers the question a list never does, not "what do I own" but "what do I play right now." Tonight names one game, not another list.

Rating was the other cut. Five stars stall you ("is this a 7 or an 8?") and give you numbers that do not compare. Playwall asks two "better than?" questions against games you have already finished and derives the score from where it lands. Your first finish has nothing to rank against, so it just becomes rank one. No star picker, ever.

We also turned down the ads category. The wall keeps one blurred, dimmed promoted slot that can never outshine your own games. Building around ads would have meant breaking that, and the whole point is a wall of things you love.

What we learned

Deleting things is easy. The work is the replacement. Anyone can rip out the shame counter; earning back what it quietly did, keeping you oriented in your own pile, took the wall, the pill, Tonight, and the galaxy.

Built With

• cloudflare-workers
• cloudkit
• igdb
• revenuecat
• storekit
• swift
• swift-testing
• swiftdata
• swiftui