Vol. I · A small mobile utility studio
Make shipping boring.
We ship small mobile utility apps for iOS and Android — the kind you reach for once a week and never delete. Patient timelines, native code, six fixed categories, no theatre.
Chapter 01 — what this is
The slow part
of a small app.
Most small mobile apps that age well do so because the team holding them keeps doing the same five things, on a written cadence, for long enough that month nine starts paying month one back. We help with the holding-to. The clever ideas are easy; the discipline of staying narrow for twelve months is the entire job. Most of what we ship is unglamorous on purpose.
We work on a fixed list of utility categories — cleaners, VPN, scanners, converters, privacy tools, file managers, camera tools, battery and device, safety utilities. We do not take on every kind of app. The scope of what we know how to ship well is the scope of what we ship, and we say no to the rest in writing.
We are deliberately small. Four people, distributed, mostly working in writing. We take on a small number of engagements at a time — the practice is most useful at sustained, weekly cadence over a quarter, and we cannot do that for more than a handful of titles at once without becoming a different kind of firm.
“The clever ideas are easy; the discipline of staying narrow for twelve months is the entire job.”
The next page describes the practice in long form: the categories we work in, how an engagement runs, the tools we use, and the small handful of things we will refuse. If anything on it sounds like the kind of conversation you would like to have, the email at the bottom of this page is the right next step.
Chapter 02 — get in touch
Email is the channel.
We watch the inbox during the working day and reply by the next one. If your project has a real deadline, put a date in the subject line and we will prioritise honestly.
A useful first email is a paragraph or two. Tell us what you are hoping to ship, which one or two of the utility categories it most closely fits, and roughly when you would like to begin. Polish is unnecessary; specifics help.