My App's Origin Story: From an "Ugly" App to a Principled Mission
The journey to create Quotivate didn't start with a business plan. It started with a 90s-era personal tool, a commitment to privacy, and a challenge to build exclusively within the Apple ecosystem.
You know that moment when you’re scrolling through your phone at 6:30 AM, desperately seeking some spark of inspiration to kickstart your day, and instead, you’re met with social media chaos and notification overload? That’s precisely where the story of Quoative begins – not with a grand business plan or a Silicon Valley eureka moment, but with a simple human need wrapped in a memory, seasoned with a hefty dose of personal challenge.
Years ago, I’d a wonderfully clunky desktop application that I’d built myself. Picture this: an old Delphi app that looked like it crawled out of the 90s – three stark columns labeled ‘Author,’ ‘Quote,’ and ‘Category,’ with a tiny plus sign perched in the corner like a digital afterthought. It was, as I described it to anyone who’d listen, “ugly, but functional.”The kind of tool that embodied the raw, unpolished power of early software development when function trumped form every single time.
But here’s the thing about ugly, functional tools – they stick with you like that worn leather jacket you refuse to throw away. This little digital shoebox became my personal sanctuary for collecting snippets of wisdom, humor, and those random, profound thoughts that strike you while you’re stuck in traffic. Click, type, and save. Right-click to edit or delete. Simple. Direct. Mine.
The ritual was almost meditative: wake up, coffee in hand, open the app, read today’s dose of inspiration. It was my private morning ceremony, free from algorithms trying to manipulate my emotions or ads trying to sell me things I didn’t need.
After a long hiatus from app development (life has a way of pulling you in different directions, doesn’t it?), that old itch resurfaced with a vengeance. This time, the motivation was threefold, like a perfectly balanced stool that wouldn’t wobble under pressure.
First, I wanted to create a vastly better experience than my old desktop relic – something modern, intuitive, and genuinely beautiful. The kind of app that wouldn’t make people squint and wonder if they’d time-traveled back to 1999.
Second, and this is where things get interesting, I wanted to put a philosophy I’ve long held to the test. In a previous piece I wrote, The iOS Advantage, I argued that committing to Apple’s native tools often yields a superior result.
So, for Quoative, I challenged myself to build something from scratch using exclusively that ecosystem. No third-party backend-as-a-service, no cross-platform UI kits, no external analytics tracking every tap and swipe. Just pure Apple frameworks – Swift, SwiftUI, SwiftData, CloudKit, StoreKit. This constraint wasn’t just about technical purity; it was a personal quest to prove my own theory.
And third, it was about creating something for others who might be searching for that same pocket of daily inspiration, that quiet moment of reflection before the world demands their attention.
Here’s where I need to get vulnerable for a moment. Quotivate wasn’t born from market research or trend analysis. It came from a deep-seated belief that had been growing stronger over the years: our digital privacy is sacred, and we shouldn’t have to trade it for convenience.
I’ll be honest – I’m what you might call a privacy freak, not in the tinfoil-hat way, but in the “why-does-this-flashlight-app-need-access-to-my-contacts” way. I read privacy policies (yes, really), scrutinize app permissions, and genuinely lose sleep over how much of our personal data we casually hand over to companies who see us as products to be monetized.
So when I set out to build Quotivate, one thing was absolutely non-negotiable: it had to be 100% private. I wanted to prove to myself – and hopefully to others – that it’s possible to build a great, personalized experience without harvesting user data like some digital combine harvester.
It had to embody minimalist design principles – clean lines, purposeful white space, and typography that didn’t strain your eyes at 6 AM. But minimalism without a soul is just emptiness, so it also needs to be genuinely delightful to use. Not just functional, not just private, but something that would make people smile when they opened it.
The core offering would be elegantly straightforward: a free daily quote card and a home screen widget. For users wanting to dive deeper, a premium one-time purchase (not a subscription – another principle I refused to compromise on) would unlock the ability to browse all categories, create personal quotes, favorite any quote, and have everything sync seamlessly and privately across devices using CloudKit.
It sounds like a clear, principled vision, doesn’t it? Like something you could knock out in a weekend or two.
Spoiler alert: Sticking to those principles, especially the “Apple-ecosystem-only” and “100% private” ones, led me down a rabbit hole of complexity that would make Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland look like a leisurely stroll through the park.
Coming up in Part 2: I’ll dive into the technical nitty-gritty—the 180-hour journey of wrestling with SwiftData, CloudKit, and SwiftUI, and the two complete restarts it took to get it right.