Daniel, the maker behind Crafter Apps

Hey, I'm Daniel — aka Solo Swift Crafter. A solo iOS and macOS developer, and Crafter Apps is where I publish what I build.

This is the apps side of what I do. The community side lives over at Crafter's Lab — but here, it's just me and the apps.

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How I got here

My journey didn't start with code. Not really. I was juggling university and a part-time gig at a little restaurant, completely obsessed with Apple's flat-design era — those clean lines from Jony Ive's team pulled me in. I had no idea how I'd break in, but I knew I had to find a way.

So I started freelancing iOS UI design — Sketch mockups, taking any gig I could find — while running weird little late-night app experiments on the side. Half the time I was grabbing chunks of SpriteKit from YouTube, pasting them in, and hoping the thing would run. Most of those apps were a mess. That was the magic.

Then SwiftUI hit and the doors blew open. After a stint at Glassfy and years of helping clients ship, I made the leap after WWDC 25 — all-in on solo dev. Crafter Apps is everything I've shipped since.

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AI as teammates, not tools

This is the part that sets me apart. Claude, Cursor, Codex — they aren't shortcuts. They're collaborators. I write briefs for them, review their work, run sessions with them the way I'd run sessions with another human. They sit next to me in the workflow, not behind it.

I don't think there's a hard line between a "vibe coder" and a "real developer" anymore. We're all building. The whole point of AI teammates is to close the gap between an idea bouncing in your head and something you can actually ship — without losing the craft on the way down.

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How I build

Every Crafter app follows what I call the SLC mindset — Simple, Lovable, Complete. No half-done features. No over-engineered code nobody asked for. If it is not useful before an upgrade and honest about its limits, it is not ready to ship.

Day-to-day I'm in Swift, SwiftUI, Xcode, and Figma — with Cursor, Claude, and Codex sitting alongside. No advertising profiles, no dark-pattern subscriptions, and clear privacy details for every app. Respect is part of the product, not a marketing feature.

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What I'm shipping

The full lineup lives on the Apps page. Live products link to the App Store; work in progress, on-hold projects, and archived experiments are labeled instead of being presented as shipped.

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Say hi

If you want to chat about apps, AI workflows, SwiftUI, or anything else — the door's open. Email me at developer@crafterapps.com, or find me on YouTube and Instagram as Solo Swift Crafter.

Keep building, keep vibing — and don't let anyone talk you out of your momentum.
— Daniel