Tech, mostly Apple, from Lex Friedman.
23 pieces tagged “Indie Developer Spotlight”
A read-later app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac built around turning pages instead of scrolling
I don’t know who invented the “read it later” app concept. I know I’ve used and loved several apps for later reading over the years. The read it later craze was at one point so frothy that my pal Dan Moren and I created a joke bookmarklet called Read It Now.…
63 apps, many of them free, all of them thoughtful utilities
Sindre Sorhus makes a slew of apps. His site puts the count at 63. Most are simple, which I mean as a legitimate compliment: They’re singularly focused, do what you expect, and are straightforward to use. Sorhus is a full-time open-source developer. He quit…
The AltStore and Delta developer knows Apple hasn’t always been his biggest fan. But Apple is increasingly acting like a partner.
Riley Testut built his own app store because Apple wouldn’t let him play Pokémon on his iPhone. That’s an oversimplification, but barely. But the early App Store rejection Riley dealt with became his origin story, and it doesn’t get more indie than this: A…
James Thomson is my friend. He’s also an insanely talented developer and former Apple engineer. He is meticulously focused on making and keeping his apps awesome. You probably know about some of them. Maybe even all! But let’s celebrate James’s greatness…
A sundial doesn’t tell you what time it is. It shows you where the sun is. That’s the idea behind Sundial, a widget app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac from Tangwan, a solo developer who ships apps under the name Softminilabs. Sundial takes a stretch of time…
Apps for music and video lovers.
Marcos Tanaka makes the media apps that fill in the gaps left by Apple’s stock software. He calls his company Loop Apps. There’s MusicHarbor, which makes sure you never miss new releases from your favorite artists. I’m a completionist. If my favorite bands…
Turn your Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby library into a classic cable experience
“When we got everything we wanted, we lost something.” That’s what Carter Fort told me when we had a conversation about Coax, his first indie app. He’s been writing software a long time, but Coax is his first solo app. It’s in the App Store, for Apple TV…
A LEGO collection manager and a git worktree command center, from the same one-person shop
Jared Sorge makes two apps that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but that both clearly speak to things he’s passionate about. The best apps are the ones whose developers are passionate about them. Jared builds an app for tracking your LEGO…
Track electric, gas, and water use one reading at a time, and find out whether the new fridge is paying off
MeterStats is an iPhone and iPad app for people who want to know about utilities their home is actually using. Sure, you could wait for the (potentially painful surprise!) of the utility bill a month later. But it’s 2026. We want to know now. That’s what…
Apps for the neurodivergent — and everyone else
Martin Höller builds apps for people with busy minds. The most popular one works by refusing to let you ignore it. Höller is originally from Graz, Austria, spent eight years in Berlin, and has lived in Florence since 2022. He’s been building for Apple’s…
Greg de J makes apps that leave things out with intention. I wrestled with that sentence, but I think it’s right. Apps tend to get more complicated over time, because adding features is easy and removing is scary, and tends to alienate at least some users…
Puzzling Snapshots is a puzzle app full of great photography. That’s not surprising once you know who made it: developer Mark Courtney is a professional photographer. All 250 photos in the app are his — flowers, scenery, travel, wildlife — and it’s clear he…
First of all, Bjango is fun to say. What a great name for a company. If you’re struggling to place how you know the name Bjango, you likely have familiarity with their long-beloved app iStat Menus. They call it “the ultimate system monitor,” and it is. When…
Air quality in the US is much better than it was decades ago — but wildfire smoke is threatening and even reversing some recent gains. Worldwide, air quality is improving over time, overall… But that’s mostly thanks to some huge countries in Asia making…
Amy Worrall’s new Mac app launches today. Its pitch: never open the SF Symbols app again.
If you build apps for Apple’s platforms, you likely use SF Symbols. Apple ships thousands of them, they’re very well designed, and most of the time the one you need already exists. Then there’s the time you can’t find the precise Apple-drawn symbol that your…
Fun for you. Not your mates.
Deep Green is a chess app. It’s not a telemetry-loaded, ad-serving, account-requiring app. It’s a chess app. And it’s not just any chess app. It’s a chess app that dates back to the Apple Newton in 1998. I never had an Apple Newton. This is a regret of mine.…
Greg Pierce makes apps for nerds and power users — but also for everyone else. Pierce is the developer behind Agile Tortoise, a name so good you might get shellshocked. If you’ve spent any significant amount of time nerding out over iPhone automation, you’ve…
Rafael Conde’s roster of apps is bursting with personality. I don’t know Rafael personally, but I feel like I kinda know him through his apps. There’s a delightful pattern in Rafa’s apps. John Siracusa’s apps come from John’s needs for his Mac to behave…
Marc Palmer’s framing app goes native on the Mac, adds privacy redactions and Magic Import, and stops charging for the basics.
As a person with a growing number of apps in the App Store, and now one with a tech site, I take a lot of screenshots. Like many of you, I know Apple’s keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots by heart, and I use them frequently. Shareshot upgrades…
I am lightly annoyed with Casey Liss. Let me be clear: I respect and admire Casey Liss. I appreciate Casey Liss. I genuinely think Casey Liss is a great dude. But I am annoyed with him nonetheless. There are a few reasons for this annoyance. First and…
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…
You’d be hard-pressed to find corners of the Apple nerd community where John Siracusa’s name isn’t known. He wrote those mammoth OS X reviews for Ars Technica for many years — some of which you may still be reading now. (They were long.) He cohosts Accidental…
One of the motivations for launching Lex On Tech was a Mastodon post I read that bemoaned the lack of websites highlighting indie apps. I love the idea of celebrating more independent developers — and indeed, I launched this site with Apps I Love as a core…
