Hungry
In 2014, two equally important things happened: Apple released Swift, and I got annoyed at my co-workers. Every day, without fail, we would spend half the lunch break debating where to go. There had to be an app for that!
So I created Hungry, which asks you how much you are willing to pay for your meal, and how far you are willing to go. Then it picks a random place for you based on your input, including images, the menu and the option to call the place. This was all based on Swift, so developing the app introduced me to the language and solved the equally pressing woes of our lunch breaks.
The app worked perfectly reliable - we no longer discussed where to go, but instead discussed why we would not want to go to the place the app has suggested.
An unexpected learning of creating Hungry is how much the App Store Ecosystem changed between 2012, when I created Local Images and 2015, when I pushed hungry to the App Store. I have put the exact same amount of marketing and promotion into both apps1. Local Images had several hundred to thousands of downloads and even an in-app purchase or two, despite essentially being an app that did nothing but display nice images. Hungry had downloads in the low single-digits, probably only my co-workers.
This made me glad I had never seriously pursued my dreams of becoming an indie developer.
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