One of the reasons I launched Lex On Tech was to highlight independent developers more often. Today the spotlight goes to Europe, and to Ben Rice McCarthy, who has been designing and shipping iPhone apps for more than a decade. I’m a big fan of Ben the human, the designer, and the app developer.
Many indie developers are engineers who picked up enough design sense to ship something that looks good enough. Ben went the other direction: They studied graphic design in college, then taught themselves to code — Objective-C first, Swift later — so they could build the things they had already designed. You can tell which one came first. Ben’s apps don’t read as feature lists with a coat of paint on top. Each one starts with a thoughtful interface, focused on smart interactions and careful design.
Obscura
Obscura is the flagship, and Ben has been working on it since 2014. Obscura 2 was an Apple Editors’ Choice in 2018, ran on the demo iPhones in Apple Stores around the world, and turned up on slides at WWDC. The tagline — “built for pros, designed for everyone” — is spot on.
Everything is reachable one-handed. Radial dials swing out from a button when you tap and drag. Manual focus comes with peaking and a loupe. There are haptics, so you can feel a stop of exposure go by without looking. And when you change a setting, the value flashes across the viewfinder in enormous type, so you keep your eyes on your subject instead of on the app.
Obscura spent much of its life as a paid app that you re-bought at each major version. With Obscura 4, it went free to download, with an Obscura Ultra subscription — $3.99 a month, $24.99 a year, or $64.99 once — unlocking everything.
Obscura Studio
Obscura Studio is the photo editor, and it’s the same deal — free to play with every filter and tool, with saving and exporting behind Obscura Ultra or a cheaper Studio+ tier at $1.99 a month or $11.99 a year.
The restraint here is the whole point. After ten years on the capture half of photography, Ben built the develop half as a separate app instead of bolting six more panels onto Obscura. Two jobs, two apps, neither one bloated.
Croissant and Indigo
Two of Ben’s apps are collaborations with Canadian developer Aaron Vegh, and they’re the clearest illustration of the friction-removal instinct.
Croissant arrived in 2024 and does one thing: You write a post once, and it goes to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. It handles threads, images, alt text, and Mastodon content warnings, and it costs $2.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $59.99 once. Ben and Aaron built it after getting fed up copying the same post — and the same alt text — between three apps. The alt text is the tell. Someone who bothered to solve the alt text problem is thinking about readers, not just about posters.
Indigo is the bigger swing, out this past May for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s one timeline holding both Bluesky and Mastodon, synced across your devices, with a composer that posts to both at once. Reading is free; the rest is $4.99 a month, $34.99 a year, or $119.99 for good.
The rest
The remaining four apps are where the design muscle stays loose. Ketchup for Poké is a free Pokédex and catch tracker, with the original 151 included and everyone since behind a Ketchup+ purchase. Aether is a $1.99 Pokémon type calculator built around three dials, with no tracking, no upsell, and no subscription — you buy it and you own it. Freckle makes polka-dot wallpapers. Agile 3 is a game about tapping dots quickly.
Points, as ever, for naming. Ketchup, for an app about catching them all, is very good.
Ben also consults for other indie developers these days, lending the design eye out to other people’s apps. (Including helping me out with mine!).
Check out Ben’s apps.