SwipeGallery

Inspiration

Digging through a camera roll one photo at a time to free up space is just clunky and boring. TikTok already trained everyone's thumb to swipe through content nonstop without even thinking about it, so I figured that same gesture could make cleaning your gallery feel just as addictive instead of feeling like a chore.

What it does

SwipeGallery turns cleaning up your photos and videos into a quick swiping game. Swipe up or down to delete, swipe the other way to keep, and just fly through your camera roll instead of tapping into each photo and hitting delete one by one.

How we built it

Built the whole thing with Compose Multiplatform so the UI and logic are shared between Android and iOS from one codebase. CMP handles the shared business logic, and I plugged in native platform APIs where I needed real access to the photo library on each OS.

Challenges we ran into

Biggest challenge was making photo loading feel instant. Nobody wants to sit there staring at a spinner while their whole camera roll loads in. I ended up building a caching and batching system so photos load in small batches as you scroll, instead of trying to load everything up front. That way the first batch shows up fast and the rest keeps loading in the background while you're already swiping.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Got SwipeGallery to almost 200 downloads, which felt awesome for something I built solo. Also made my first real money from it, $40 from someone picking up a yearly subscription. Small numbers but it's proof people actually want this.

What we learned

Got a lot better at Compose Multiplatform and figured out how to actually ship a KMP app end to end. Also ended up spinning off the photo and video loading gallery piece into its own library called Pikto, which is my first published library ever.

What's next for SwipeGallery

Next up is running some A/B tests on different pricing models to see what actually converts. Also want to keep growing the user base and hit my first $100 in revenue before the Shipaton wraps up.

Built With

• cmp
• compose
• compose-multiplatform
• jetpack
• kotlin
• kotlin-multiplatform