Launched an App with Zero Coding Experience

TLDR;

I made a poker bankroll management app to help players keep track of their games, chart progress, and study important hand metrics entirely in SwiftUI. Completely self-taught, I know almost nothing about the software industry, and this was a huge challenge but incredibly fun. More info below.

Long Story

During the pandemic, my dog was diagnosed with cancer and my wife and I ultimately had to say goodbye to him in late 2020. It was truly a difficult time, and I was recently struggling with how to spend my time while the world was shut down. I needed a distraction in the worst way, and I turned my sights to iOS coding. My background is in photography and cinematography, so software was an entirely different animal.

I wasn't sure where to start, so I took a very basic intro course on the Swift language on Udemy. After learning the basics and fundamentals of Swift, I moved on to YouTube.

Sean Allen, Paul Hudson, CodeWithChris, Swiftful Thinking... these channels were insanely helpful in my SwiftUI journey and I honestly can't begin to fathom how much effort it takes to compile all the content they willingly put out for free. It's staggering.

Being that most of my understanding of SwiftUI has been put together piecemeal and from random tutorials across the web, I still feel like I have glaring holes in my comprehension of the Swift language, and in software in general. It's classic "the more you know the more you don't know." I'm addicted to learning more, despite having no career ambition of going into the field, I just find it a lot of fun to build stuff that's useful.

On to my app.

It's called Left Pocket. You can check it out on the App Store if you'd like. It's free to use and log up to 25 poker sessions, beyond that I have a paywall for the Pro version for $3.99/mo. This is not in any way life changing money nor am I even looking to supplement my income. More just a way of recouping the 6 months or so it took me to get to this point.

As I mentioned at the top, the app is to help poker players track their games, chart progress, and log all of their sessions. I'm a poker player myself (not as much of a grinder these days) and so I wanted to make something better than what was already out there. There was one app that was pretty ubiquitous in the poker community that people used to track their bankroll, but it was clunky, outdated, crashed a lot, and frankly just really unappealing from a UI perspective. I wanted something nice to look at, easy to understand, and something I would actually want to use.

The initial version of the app was fine, nothing that would blow your socks off design-wise, but I, along with most "creatives" am never truly satisfied with my work so I went about launching a new version this past week with an improved interface, some more features, and the paywall. The paywall service was done using RevenueCat. For a dummy like me, it was fairly straightforward setting up.

All in all, I quite enjoy SwiftUI and would love to be able to sink my teeth into another project. The hard part is the WHAT. I want it to be worthwhile, not just a To-Do list or a cute weather app.

This isn't to sell anyone on the app, I figure there's only a tiny amount of crossover between poker players and SwiftUI anyway. I just wanted to share the journey, and say that if a dumb-dumb like me can figure it out, so can you. If anyone wants to check it out and offer feedback or design suggestions, I'm always all ears.