Inspiration

On vacation with my sister, we spent our evenings playing board games, and we had a blast. Back home, we wanted to keep playing, just on our phones. So we downloaded the most popular word game app, and it was a letdown: ads everywhere, constant promotional push notifications, and it even accepted words that aren't real words.

So I thought: I'll just build our own app.

How I built it

Turnmates is fully native on iOS (SwiftUI) and Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose), with Firebase as the backend. I've built many apps with this stack over the years, but with AI it's gotten dramatically faster and better than it used to be.

Challenges

The App Store review, as so often.

And Google Play: for apps from personal developer accounts, you need at least 12 testers opted in for 14 consecutive days before you're even allowed to publish. Getting 12 people to keep coming back to an app that doesn't officially exist yet was painful.