Member-only story
Indie Dev Diaries: Shelf Life — my Shipaton sprint to App Store release
4 min readAug 21, 2025
Press enter or click to view image in full size
👋 The Challenge
I wanted to push myself: build and ship an iOS app within the Shipathon 2025 timeline while juggling my full-time job. That app became Shelf Life — a simple, joyful diary where you can drop photos, notes, and links that made your day better.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
💡 Ideation Phase
Like many devs, I started with way too many ideas. I dumped them all into ChatGPT for brainstorming and came out with a shortlist: a few productivity tools, a playful camera app, and this “joy diary” concept.
What hooked me with Shelf Life was its simplicity:
- It doesn’t require signups
- Just stores your joys locally (Core Data FTW)
- Future roadmap: sync with CloudKit
It was small enough to scope, but meaningful enough that I’d actually want to use it daily.
