Five years of home-cooked apps

This is a note to com­mem­o­rate that it’s now been five years since I wrote about the app I built for my family, and the rev­e­la­tions I found embedded in the experience. That post has been one of the great durable hits of my online writing life: it con­tinues to find new readers, week after week after week. (I know, because many of them email me!)

The “home-cooked app” con­cept has since been extended and elab­o­rated by many folks, notably the ter­rific Maggie Appleton. And it’s been turbocharged, of course, by Claude and company, which are like … super-duper food processors? for the home-cook programmer. I suppose they are also, in a sense, well-stocked gro­cery stores … I’ll leave fur­ther abuse of the analogy as an exer­cise for the reader.

But, I have to say, as the years have passed, it’s one par­tic­ular prop­erty of home-cooked apps that has become, for me, the most important. Availability, tractability, specificity: all great. But don’t sleep on sovereignty.

At the con­clu­sion of my orig­inal post, I wrote:

This mes­saging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a user­base inscrutable to us.

In the five years since writing that, I’ve watched so many apps — most of the apps!! — mutate before my eyes. Sharp sparkles of AI now lodge them­selves in everything, a mist of unwanted invitation. Comixology, once such a locus of fun, was absorbed by Amazon and reemerged flat and joyless. (All those dig­ital comics I bought, effec­tively gone.) When I wrote my orig­inal post, Insta­gram was still a photo-sharing app! I mean!

Meanwhile, my little home-cooked apps each do the one thing they are sup­posed to do, sparkle-free. These apps are sub­stan­tially fin­ished on the day I “launch” them, and, unlike modern com­mer­cial software, they are allowed to just: be fin­ished.