iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I’m working on something really exciting for iPhone Duo that I am trying to get out on day one, but I need to confirm it works correctly on device. I’ve applied to many workshops now and have not gotten into any and I’m getting desperate.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

If anyone is going to an iPhone Duo Workshop or has access to a Duo in the next week or so and can do me a really quick favor, I’d really appreciate it. My DMs are open.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I am playing the world's tiniest violin for the people at Apple who were told that they had to build the entire proposal before they could get it approved. The number of times we developers have heard this same thing from App Review is too high to count. mastodon.social/@daringfireba...

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I for one welcome our new sarcastic overlords.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The LLMs are getting better at playing along with our jokes and this is both entertaining and a bit concerning.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

We love Millbrae Pancake House

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Gee, that's a nice app you got there. It would be a shame if we had to take it down because it's not getting enough downloads. Have you tried App Store Search Ads?

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Introduce yourself with 10 bands/musicians you've seen live Groundation (x8) Tool (x6) Metallica (x5) Cake (x3) Toots & The Maytals (x2) A Perfect Circle (x2) Red Hot Chili Peppers (x2) Soundgarden (x2) NIN Radiohead (x0.5)

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

One of my goals in life is to never attend a webinar.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Every time an AI agent asks me if I want to proceed I am obligated to say this out loud

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

My first Deep Dish Swift was such a great experience. I am again reminded how friendly and interesting iOS/Apple/Swift folks are. I had so many great conversations with new and old friends in such a short time. Thanks so much to @joshdholtz.com and Kari for organizing it!

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

In the attached video you can watch me iterating to make something similar to the Messages app icon in under 2 minutes.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Icon Composer is only available on the Mac, but my app is a native Mac and iPad app. It is also great for people who aren't experts at Icon Composer because you can just describe the changes you want in plain English and the LLM can figure out what to do.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

The easiest model would be to have the user enter an API key so they are charged directly for the LLM costs as they go. Since the target market is developers, that is probably viable, at least initially.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

One possible business model would be to offer consumable token packs so the user can pay as they go, but that adds ongoing friction and backend accounting. I could try a pricy subscription to cover the LLM costs, but it would have to be rate limited to avoid heavy users making me go bankrupt.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Determining the right business model for this app is challenging. Using an LLM to generate icons, read existing icons, and all of the interaction eats through tokens quickly. The longer the conversation, the more it costs. In some of my testing it was pretty easy to spend a dollar or two per icon.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

If you've worked with LLMs to produce code, you know that when the output is good, it is totally amazing. And when it is bad, it can be super frustrating. Much of the effort on this project has been testing and iterating on it out to figure how to reduce frustration as much as possible.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

That's where my new app comes in. It is similar to Claude Code in that you can chat with it (by voice or typing) and iterate on generating icons without dragging and dropping over and over. It is similar to working with a designer that gives you almost immediate results.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

To produce high quality app icons you should still hire a good designer. But for personal projects or placeholder icons, it is fine to use ChatGPT to output decent icons. But this takes some iteration that can be cumbersome, especially if you are trying to make icons composed of multiple layers.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Last year Apple released a tool called Icon Composer which you can use to create app icons for the new Apple liquid glass world. Icon Composer supports multiple layers and you can add SVGs or PNGs and put them together and add liquid glass 3D effects as well as other basic image tools.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

My final #BuildInPublic post this week is an app that I think has the most potential. This is just an MVP, but with some polishing, I think it could be ready to release soon. I like to this of this app as "Claude Code meets Icon Composer".

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

So I have an app that solves my specific need, which is one I suspect not many other people have. And for those who do share my navigating preferences, I doubt this is something they would pay for on an ongoing basis. But in this age of AI-generated personal apps, that is perfectly fine with me.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

The Google Maps directions API doesn't throttle, but every API call costs a fraction of a cent. There is a decent free tier before you are charged, though. This is fine for personal use, but the costs could add up if the app is used regularly by lots of people, especially the widget.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

The Apple Maps directions API is free to use, but it gets throttled quickly when you ask for many different routes in a short period of time. This is pretty limiting if you want to set up multiple trips and have the traffic data be fairly up to date.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I've been using this app for a few months and it works well. I added a widget which I find to be the quickest way to glance at the different routes and choose which one I want to take. It has a button that opens your favorite navigation app to the fastest route.

Screenshot of widget showing the fastest route

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

So I built an iOS app to answer this question. You just create a new trip and then add different routes using waypoints. Then the app checks Apple and Google Maps traffic conditions and lets me see the expected travel time for each route and which is currently the fastest.

Screenshot of the app showing an ETA for each route

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

If I use Apple Maps or Google Maps to check their recommendations, they offer 3 different routes they have determined are the best options. But the options change and are sometimes really odd. I just wanted a way to see quickly if should I take 101, 280, or city streets based on current traffic.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

For instance, I need to drive downtown at least twice a week. From home I can take one of two freeways or drive through city streets if the freeways are congested. Without traffic, 101 is the fastest option, 280 is second, and driving through the Mission is the slowest. But there is often traffic.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I think most people just follow whatever route their chosen navigation app chooses for them every time. I do this when I'm unfamiliar with where I'm going. However, when I'm driving somewhere I'm very familiar with, I usually have preferred routes that I choose based on current traffic conditions.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

My 3rd #BuildInPublic post this week might be a bit more boring than the others. It is a unique navigation app that I made for myself to scratch a very specific itch that I don't think most people have, so it isn't likely I will release it.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

So WalkStar for Spotify remains completed but unreleased to this day. Maybe someday I will just release WalkStar with all features for free with support for Apple Music and Spotify for fun. But from my #BuildInPublic posts this week you will see that I have many other projects I am working on.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

By this point, WalkStar had not taken off and I was working on other things. The idea of releasing WalkStar for Spotify as a separate app with no monetization, and a decent, but not flawless Spotify integration that would likely result in support requests from its few downloads was not appealing.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

During the review, I found out that they will not allow any app that controls music on Spotify to monetize in any way. So if you want to play music on Spotify you can't make any money. No ads, no IAP, nothing. So my only option was to make a separate WalkStar for Spotify free app with no IAP.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

I first submitted WalkStar for Spotify integration review in early December 2024 hoping I could launch the app with both Spotify and Apple Music support in February. Long story short, my app was rejected twice and finally approved in... August. Eight months after my first submission.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Apple's App Review used to take a week to review your app, and if anything was wrong, you had to resubmit and wait another week. Apple has reduced its review time to 1-2 days which is much improved. But Spotify? Their app review turnaround is 6 *weeks* minimum. If you get rejected, it is brutal.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

It took me weeks of testing and fixing and polishing to overcome all of the technical challenges in order to release it. Then came the biggest challenge of all: Spotify App Review. You might think Apple App Review is a nightmare (it is), but Spotify's is even worse.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Spotify has an SDK that can be used to launch their app and send messages to the app on the device to play/update the music, but it is super flaky. So in WalkStar I used this SDK, but if it failed, I had to call the Spotify Web API as backup, which meant you had to be connected to the Internet.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

This was a problem for WalkStar because it only plays music while you are walking. So if it tells Spotify to pause music, the app will be killed by iOS. I solved this by creating a 10 hour silent podcast on Spotify. So instead of telling Spotify to pause, it switches to the silent podcast instead.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

You can't just call out to Spotify to start playing music in the background like you can with Apple Music. You can only launch the Spotify app in the foreground and tell it to start playing music and jump back to your app. But then Spotify is in the background and has to play music to stay running.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

There were many hurdles to jump over in order to get WalkStar working with Spotify. First off, playing music with Apple Music consists of making a few API calls built-in to iOS. Playing music with Spotify on iOS, however, is a serious technical challenge due mostly to iOS limitations.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

WalkStar currently only works with Apple Music, which limits its potential audience quite a bit, but it should be able to find success within this limited audience as there are 10s of millions of Apple Music subscribers. This thread, however, is about getting WalkStar to work with Spotify as well.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

WalkStar was a super fun app to build, but it never got enough traction. I could have marketed it better, but frankly its retention was not what I expected. I hoped a fun, retro, motivational app that encourages people to get out and move would be stickier, but I guess not. walkstar.app

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

For my second #BuildInPublic post, I have an app that is actually done, but will probably never be released. To explain why, I will start by telling you about an app called WalkStar I released just over a year ago. It plays music, but only when you are walking. If you stop, the music stops.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Hmm, BlueSky does some weird split background thing with portrait videos that looks really funky.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

So what do you think? Is this something worth pursuing? Let me know in the comments! I think this could be really useful as a CarPlay app. Apologies for the video quality. I couldn't capture the voice interaction and music with a screen capture.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

I'm not sure if I'll end up releasing this. It's fun, but the voice-based APIs are not cheap to use (working with OpenAI and Gemini), and I don't know if people are willing to pay money for this. I got it working with Apple Foundation Models framework (free), but it was a pretty poor experience.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

AI-generated playlists aren't new, they're in Spotify today and Apple Music soon. But they're cumbersome to use: type, add playlist, then hit play. What if instead the process was frictionless and ephemeral? Don't save the playlist if you don't want to. Just speak and then sit back and listen.

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Greg Gardner @gregggreg.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

For my first #BuildInPublic post, I have a fun one. What if you could have your own personal DJ that spins tracks for you based on how you were feeling at the moment, with minimal fuss? Just mention a mood, genre, vibe, whatever, and the music starts playing. Be sure to watch with the volume on.

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