For most of my 20s I lived what looked like a dream life: top erotic photographer with 600k Instagram followers, YouTube at 100k, and a crazy crypto run in 2017 that gave me a $300k+ portfolio at one point. I genuinely believed I was some kind of genius who could succeed quickly at anything.
Reality eventually corrected me. Crypto crash, failed clothing brand, Instagram ban, multiple depressions, and the painful realization that I wasn’t exceptionally talented — I had just gotten very lucky early. By my early 30s I was in Paris, studying at School 42 (the famous French programming school with no teachers), trying to rebuild from scratch.
I didn’t want another physical product business. I wanted something digital. But my technical skills were weak. Then LLMs opened the door.
The idea for the app came from my own painful relationship with the phone.
For over 10 years I used iPhones that showed only the battery icon, no percentage. I charged when it turned yellow or red. When I finally enabled the percentage on a new phone in 2025, I was shocked by how much battery I was losing to mindless scrolling — often 6–7 hours a day.
I started tracking it manually in Google Sheets. The idea of not charging my phone for two days came to me pretty quickly and intuitively (the battery lasted well beyond that with moderate use), and I really liked it. My screen time gradually decreased and physically couldn’t exceed 3.5 hours a day — otherwise, I wouldn’t have made it to the evening of the second day on a single charge (for comparison, before that I used to spend 6–7 hours a day on my phone). The nature of my usage changed, too — 3 hours of screen time spent scrolling through short videos drains the battery much more than 3 hours of reading messages, checking websites, and so on.
Then the core concept hit me: what if the app forced you into real 1- or 2-day challenges without charging the phone? A widget showing your consumption against the survival line would create constant awareness and a physical limit you couldn’t ignore like regular screen-time blockers.
Everything aligned: I needed a graduation project for school, I wanted to build something genuinely useful for people struggling with the same problem, and LLMs had reached the point where learning iOS development from near zero seemed possible.
I pitched the idea to an experienced iOS developer friend. He immediately said “Let’s build it together.” I agreed — it would remove a huge part of the technical unknown.
We were both excited. In literally one day he put together a basic widget with a 42-hour graph. It was rough, but it was real. I was thrilled.
At the same time I submitted the project to school. Their reaction was sobering: they said it looked more like a fantasy than a proper application and told me to first validate that people actually care about this problem and that current solutions don’t solve it.
My partner started strong but then went into full “chill mode” — weeks with almost zero commits. I realized continuing would likely lead to conflict and delays I couldn’t afford. We split amicably. He sent me the ~600 lines of code he had written, and I decided to go solo despite having almost zero iOS experience.
Around the same time, a subscriber from my old Telegram channel saw one of my frustrated posts and offered to send me his personal Mac Mini M4 to support the project. After a month of complicated logistics, the Mac finally arrived.
That’s how I found myself in front of Xcode for the first time in my life.
In the next part I’ll describe the absolute chaos of my first months in development, Apple’s developer tools nightmare (especially TestFlight), and where the project stands today (spoiler: the App is already in the test flight phase and you can officially try it out: https://testflight.apple.com/join/atkgRfac )
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