An iOS update: five apps on the go
I said earlier this year that 2026 has me building apps again. What I didn’t say is quite how much. Alongside Log Book on the Mac, there are five iOS apps in various states of done, so here’s a proper update on where everything stands, what each one does, and what building five apps at once has taught me.
You’ll notice a theme quickly. My son is 12 and mad about karting, which means I spend my weekends trackside, which means my brain spends those weekends going “you know what this needs? An app.” Three of the five are the result. It turns out standing at the side of a track for hours is excellent product research time.
Launched: GoKarting
GoKarting is the social one. Find karting venues near you on a map, see what’s about, and check in when you’re actually there. Location is used for exactly two things: showing nearby tracks, and verifying you’re physically at one when you check in. It’s never touched otherwise, never sold, never handed to advertisers.
It’s the app for the question every karting family ends up asking, which is “where haven’t we tried yet?” We’ve driven all over the country for race weekends and open sessions, and I wanted the answer to be a map rather than a half-remembered list. The check-in part turns that map into a record: everywhere you’ve been, building up over a season.
It’s also the app that taught me the most, because it’s the one with real infrastructure behind it. Accounts, a backend, profile photos, a map. Every one of those is a thing you have to get right and then keep right, which brings me neatly to its opposite.
Launched: Track Position
Track Position is the simplest idea of the lot: it turns your iPhone or iPad into a pit board. Anyone who’s watched proper motorsport knows the boards teams hang over the pit wall; karting parents do the same job with whiteboards, bits of card, or frantic hand signals. Now it’s the phone already in your pocket.
Tap a position from the quick-tap grid (P1 to P10, or any custom number), flash a preset message like PUSH, PIT, BOX or COOL, or just draw whatever you need on a blank canvas with your finger. Hold it up at the fence as they come past, shake to clear, go again next lap. The screen brightness maxes out automatically so it’s readable in full sun, the display stays awake between laps, and the default is proper high-contrast yellow-on-black, with colour-blind-friendly options if you want them. There’s a persistent fastest-lap display too, so the number that matters stays on the board.
It’s also the opposite philosophy to GoKarting: no accounts, no analytics, no network access, nothing. It doesn’t even need a signal, which is handy given the one bar you get at most kart tracks. The whole app is under half a megabyte, everything lives on the device, and the privacy policy was the easiest I’ve ever written. Under “What we collect” it says: “Nothing.”
Having shipped both of these back to back, I’d say the pair make a nice case study in trade-offs. GoKarting needed accounts and a backend to be what it is; Track Position is better because it refused them. Neither approach is right, but you should know which one your app wants to be before you start. The App Store listing says “built by a karting parent, for karting parents”, and that’s the truest line I’ve ever written in marketing copy.
Launching soon: ReptileCare
The odd one out of the karting theme. ReptileCare does what the name says: it keeps on top of the feeding schedules, temperature checks and routines that reptile keeping demands. Reptiles are unforgiving of “I think I did that on Tuesday?”, and the husbandry side is exactly the kind of repetitive, dated, mustn’t-be-forgotten record keeping that phones are perfect for and memory is terrible at.
It’s in final polish now: the features are done, and what’s left is the last pass of tidying, icon fiddling and App Store prep that always takes longer than you budget for. This one should be out the door soon.
In testing: Money
Money is a personal finance app, and it’s the one I’m being most careful with. It works, I’ve been running my own finances through it daily, and in any other category that would mean shipping. But money is exactly the category where “works for me” isn’t a high enough bar. A bug in a karting app is an annoyance; a bug in a finance app is someone’s actual numbers being wrong. So it stays in testing until I trust it completely, and I’m fine with that taking as long as it takes.
In testing: Tenths
Tenths rounds out the karting trio, and it’s the most ambitious of the lot: proper telemetry, using nothing but the phone. Lap times, track position, g-forces through the corners, even the bumps, all recorded from the sensors already inside an iPhone. No transponder, no dedicated data logger bolted to the kart, no external hardware at all.
That’s the itch behind it. Real telemetry kit exists and it’s brilliant, but it’s also another few hundred pounds in a hobby that already eats money for fun, plus another thing to charge, mount and not lose. Meanwhile the phone in your pocket has GPS and motion sensors that would have embarrassed a race team not that long ago. Tenths is the bet that for a karting parent who wants to answer “is he getting quicker at this track, and where is he losing time?”, the phone is enough.
The name still gives away the philosophy: the tenths are the whole game, and being able to line up two sessions and see where they went is worth more than any single number. It’s being tested the only way that makes sense: at the track, on real race weekends, by the people it’s for. There is no better QA environment than a 12-year-old telling you exactly what’s wrong with your app between sessions. Brutal, immediate, and always right.
What building five at once taught me
A few things have crystallised across this batch.
Small scopes ship. Every one of these follows the same rule as Log Book: built because I personally wanted it, scoped to do one thing, tested by actually living with it. The moment an idea grows a second job, it’s a different app, and it goes on the bench.
Real use beats test plans. GoKarting and Track Position got hardened by race weekends. Money is getting hardened by my own bank account. There’s no substitute for your software being load-bearing in your own life.
The comeback is real. I taught myself iOS in the 2020 lockdowns and shipped two apps, then life got in the way for a while. Coming back after years of daily Rails, the platform has moved on enormously, and mostly in the right direction. The gap between “idea at a kart track on Saturday” and “working build on my phone” has never been shorter.
Two shipped, one nearly there, two cooking, and a couple more ideas on the bench behind them. The 2020 apps took me from zero to the App Store; this batch is what happens when that skill comes back with five years of pent-up ideas behind it.
More when each one crosses the line.