Chris, a solo app developer, shares a detailed look into his typical workweek managing four productivity apps: Amy (calorie tracking), Luna (budgeting), Ellie (daily planning), and others. He explains his strategy of focusing deeply on one app each week while allocating leftover time to smaller tasks on the others. This week, his main focus shifted from Amy, which had just launched, to Ellie, his daily planning app. Chris emphasizes the importance of variety in his workflow to prevent burnout and keep his work engaging.
A significant part of his week involved improving Ellie’s iOS calendar layout engine. Displaying multiple events in a readable way on a calendar proved challenging, but the release of the new Claude Opus 4.5 AI model helped him quickly develop a much better solution. He also tackled a major overhaul of Ellie’s drag-and-drop system, which was previously limited by Apple’s default SwiftUI implementation. After struggling with gesture conflicts, Chris realized that switching to UIKit, as suggested by the AI, resolved these issues and made the drag-and-drop interactions much smoother.
Chris then shifted his attention to Luna, his budgeting app, where he addressed user requests for additional currencies and finally implemented interactive charts. Again, gesture conflicts arose, but switching from SwiftUI to UIKit solved the problems. This insight led him to revisit Ellie and refactor its gesture system using UIKit, resulting in a seamless user experience across complex interactions. He highlights how lessons learned in one app often benefit his other projects.
The week also included significant improvements to app integrations. Chris migrated Ellie’s Notion integration from inefficient polling to a webhook-based system using Claude Code, making it more robust and efficient. He quickly built a new Todoist integration, demonstrating how AI tools have drastically reduced development time for complex features. Additional upgrades included redesigning Ellie’s week navigation UI, adding user-requested customization options, improving the AI assistant, and setting up advanced logging with AWS CloudWatch.
Finally, Chris applied his UIKit drag-and-drop improvements to Amy, resolving longstanding gesture bugs and enhancing the calorie tracking experience. He also revamped Amy’s goal system for better onboarding and visualization, and experimented with new features like a three-day view in Ellie. Chris concludes by emphasizing the benefits of juggling multiple apps, as cross-app learning accelerates progress and keeps his work enjoyable. He encourages viewers to follow his journey on social media and thanks them for their support.