My Next: Blog
Honest reflections from building My Next Studio. The ups, the downs, and the 5 AM creative sessions.
Three apps live on the App Store
Today all three apps are finally live on the App Store. My Next: Todo, My Next: List, and My Next: Note are out in the world as real products, not just TestFlight builds and screenshots and plans. That feels big. A little unreal too.
Submitting to App Review
The beta has been quite uneventful, which is honestly exactly what you want. A couple of translation bugs were found and fixed — things like Swedish copy that didn't quite read naturally, or keys that had snuck through without being translated. A crash was caught and fixed too, a Core Data issue that only surfaced on devices that had recently been rebooted before being unlocked for the first time. Not the kind of thing you'd easily find yourself.
AI hallucinations
All apps are now in external beta. Todo 0.3.3 is in fact approved by Apple, which is a milestone. I decided to launch all 3 apps at the same time though. Mostly to ensure that the cross functional aspects of the apps are working in beta before any of the apps are released to avoid tricky migration scenarios. The cross app linking was pretty straight forward. I started out simply with just links from a todo to a list or a note. It's quite useful though to be able to link the grocery list to a repeating todo for the weekly grocery shopping.
Automating everything
Being a solo developer, with just evenings and weekends to work on this project, it's essential to automate as much as possible and utilize AI not just for the development work but in all project related matters.
The nagging feeling
Some bugs are not simple bugs in the sense that the code isn't doing what it should. It's more that nagging feeling that the thing isn't working just as it should. When a user modifies a routine, I needed to decide what should happen to the corresponding todos for the week generated from the weekly routine. It felt natural to modify the ones in the future while keeping the past routines as they were. This worked as intended but it didn't quite feel right. I then realized that it's of course the state of the todo that should be checked. If it's completed or skipped, it shouldn't be modified no matter if it's in the past or the future. The user is already done with it so it should be left in the state it is. Seems obvious once it's defined.
First beta testers
Got the first small group of beta testers using Todo now. So far so good. First bugs reported, a couple of missed translations. Fixed a list of bugs and corrections that I found myself as well and uploaded 1.3.2 now. Spent a lot of time on the fact that "My Next" was spelled without a space in the app name. Went through all settings in App Store Connect several times. Turned out to be just the way iOS chooses to render it. Still struggling to get the subscriptions working though.
Website and Swedish localization
Added the website yesterday. Honestly, I could not have achieved this by myself. It looks great in my view. Today I've added Swedish localization. It was a bit back and forth but turned out good in the end. Now Todo is more or less ready for external beta even though I'm just starting todo (I hope at least that I'm able to install the internal beta build on my sister's phone). I also started a side project called skrivhjälp.se, let's see how it goes. Off to celebrate birthdays of sister and mum in Sala, so not that much vibing today.
First beta build on TestFlight
The first beta build is done and uploaded to TestFlight and installed it on my iPhone. Of course, 5 minutes later I found a bug :) It was quite complex to get everything working in App Store Connect.
The 64-notification discovery
5 o'clock in the morning. It's been difficult to sleep these last couple of weeks. Too many ideas about the app popping up.
Dashboard and AI productivity
Today I set up a dashboard to keep better track of the current status of things so I'm writing this post using that. It's just amazing with the productivity of AI. I ask Claude about how to keep track. It suggests a solution and 5 minutes later it's up and running. Full view of the whole project. The developer diary, git status, I can even trigger the tests from it. I'm blown away by the possibilities with AI.
Hello world
First real diary post. It's only been a short time since falling down the vibe coding rabbit hole. Still I already got a working version of My Next: Todo and am building the beta release. This trip has been crazy! I will put in some backported posts later to capture the early stages of the project.