Case Study - More Than an App
The Real Story Behind 'What's for Tea?'
This is more than just about What's for Tea. I'm fully aware that it really is just a simple decision spinner app on the face of it. I have to admit it's not that exciting really, but it's what it represents and the journey it has started that makes it exciting to me.
I had to start somewhere.
It's the test bed, the proof of concept. To build it I had to gain the skills and learn a foundation of knowledge that will springboard me to the next phase - the more interesting apps. There's a lot more of those to come.
A Word on 'Vibe Coding'
"Vibe coding," like I mentioned in the manifesto, is describing what you want to build to an LLM (I used a custom Gemini gem I created) and having it write the code for you.
Sorry proper developers who've spent years learning your trade, I genuinely feel guilty and a bit of a fraud - but It's awesome, and I'm not stopping.
Possibilities I thought impossible are now within reach. What's for Tea is just under 1500 lines of code! It took me a month to build on and off. It's crazy isn't it? I reckon that would have taken me over a year at least, building the traditional way.
This isn't to say it was easy to do mind. You can't just get AI to give you code and you're done, you need to know what to do with it.
The Real Grind
I knew I had a lot of hard work ahead of me. This meant no gaming for the foreseeable future (gasp), not if I actually want to do it. I've got a full time job (a great job to be fair) and only have a few hours in the evening when the kids are in bed to commit to this. Turns out that wasn't a problem, this was too damn interesting.
I got to work.
First of all I had to map out a plan. What platform, iOS or Android? Both. Learn two code bases? Nope. Then it's Flutter and Dart code. First decision made.
Second, what development platform? Android Studio straight away then. Android Studio and Flutter are both made by Google so it made sense to me.
Then I had to do a deep dive on some proper learning. How to use the IDE/SDK, and learn the basics of Dart code principles. I learnt what I needed to get started (Udemy is brilliant) and just jumped in at the deep end and started vibe coding.
The basic app came together relatively quickly. The majority of the work was refining, trouble shooting and evolving ideas. It was hard, frustrating. Many a night I was still there at 1am trying to figure out why the app won't run, or why an element was wonky.
Lessons from the Launchpad
Then there was getting it ready for release and submitting to the app platforms. That was another level of frustration and learning mistakes. You need to submit an app to the app store from a Mac, and only a Mac, due to the code signing etc. This meant learning how to use Mac OS, which I've never used in my life and cloning the app there from GitHub, so that also meant learning Git. A hell of a lot to learn.
All good fun and I got there. It's live on Apple as you know, but there's a 14 day closed test for indie developers on Google which I found out last week. Another lesson learned. It should be ok though and out in a couple of weeks, also I don't have to do the 14 days again for future apps.
Maybe I should have waited until live on both before I launched Sky-Hi Digital? Bollocks I'm too impatient, I just couldn't wait. Besides, when it goes live on Android in a couple of weeks that gives me an excuse to spam everyone again about it.
What's Next?
In the meantime I'm getting busy on the next app “Face Down”. This one is a lot more interesting I promise, and fits nicely into the Sky-Hi Digital ethos - to design and build clear, thoughtful tools to solve everyday problems and spark creativity in a cluttered world.
Cheers everyone.