Join the Expedition TestFlight Beta!
Personal side projects are the purest, most gratifying work I do. From idea to design to implementation to new features to maintenance to promotion to support: you truly get to do it all. And while I do some of these at work every day, there’s also a lot I don’t have to do in a hobby project: analytics, ads, deadlines, regulations, etc. I pretty much only do the fun stuff.
Experience from side projects helps time and again at my iOS day job. It’s where I learn new frameworks and features. I watch WWDC each year through the eyes of an indie dev, because I know it will usually be months or years before I use the shiny new things at work.
And in this new world of AI tools, it’s the one place I get to decide to be a bit more old-fashioned, stay sharp, and do it for the love of programming and building.
All of that to say: I’ve built a new Mastodon client. I’ve used it for years, and at times I’d forget it was software that I had written. That might be a sign that others would find it useful too. It uses no third-party dependencies. It’s probably 95% human-authored; getting it over the finish line required some tedious odds and ends AI was helpful for.
It started five years ago as a Twitter client, then the bones were reused to switch to Mastodon. Nowadays Mastodon apps are the new to-do apps I actually have one of those too. There are tons of them, and while I’ve only used a couple, I don’t know mine really stands apart. At least not yet. Now that the foundation and MVP are in place, I can start to build all of the cool features.
It does have a few novel features, such as a “combo” favorite + repost button, random header picker, Foundation Models-generated profile summaries, and locally saved tags.
I’ll officially launch it on iOS 27 release day, along with updates for my other apps. It’s still exciting for me, and brings back the memories of my very first app launch back in 2012.
If you would like to try Expedition now, you can join the TestFlight beta here. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed building it.
PS: Thanks to all of the contributors to Mastodon and the fediverse at large. No one can ever take this one away from us.