My personal app store
I had Bot build me a nutrition tracker for my iPhone, tuned just to me, with goals I set and a made-up veggie score. No ads, no upgrade to pro, my data. It beat the A-list consumer apps, and I've deleted them.
In the spirit of Sophon, where AI designs a surface at need, I've started a personal app store. The first app in it is a nutrition tracker for my iPhone. I asked Bot to build it.
It's tuned just to me. The goals are the ones I set. I can parameterize the macros, and I also added metrics of my own, like my made-up "veggie score": 1 point per serving of vegetables, 1/2 for fruit, and 1/2 for other stuff I deem healthy enough to count (a spoonful of chia seeds, say). The daily goal is 7, because I said so.
There's also a Body tab for whatever else I want to keep track of, and that changes over time, since it's my app. Right now I'm monitoring neck pain and sleep (jiu-jitsu is a tough sport, and I happen to be nursing a neck strain), so I can track the strain and my recovery. As soon as my neck has recovered, I'll pull that back out and change it to whatever I want to track next.
A personal app store means no enshittification. No ads, no "upgrade to pro", and I keep custody of my own data, which plugs into whatever I choose to analyze it with.
And the gratification is nearly instant. I describe an idea, and a few minutes later there's a first-cut app on my phone.
Cost of entry: that annoying $99 a year of gatekeeping into the Apple developer program so I can deploy to my own phone (yeah, yeah, I know Android would solve that one), a few tokens for the agentic coder, and a few bucks for the GitHub runner that builds it.
The app was better than the A-list consumer apps I'd been using from the first day, and I've already deleted them. So I'm doing more. Anything that doesn't rely on a proprietary back end (e.g. an app that's a client for a service I can't live without) or on some complex algorithm... might as well just DIY it.
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