Ceram
Context
I am bad at remembering things about people. Not birthdays, which the phone already handles, but the things that let a conversation pick up where it left off: what somebody is training for, where they have just started working. I am worse at remembering to text anyone I do not see regularly. Out of sight, out of mind, and it has nothing to do with how much I like them.
What I had instead was a running list in my notes app, which works right up until the moment you need it. What made an app seem worth building was that iOS will hand you the address book. Everyone is already on the phone. What is not on the phone is anything I know about them, or any reason to open something on a Tuesday when nobody has messaged me first.
So Ceram keeps what I know about someone on their contact card, reminds me to get in touch on a rhythm I set per person, and lets me add to any of it by talking to my phone. It is the first iOS app I have built, and it has taught me more than anything else I have made.
Details
- Role
- Founder and Engineer
- Team
- Solo
- Timeline
- Jul 2026 — present
- Tools
- Swift, Paper, Mobbin
- Deliverables
- iOS app, home screen widget, marketing site
- Status
- In build, waitlist next
Final artifacts
Key design moments
Seven screens before anyone sees the app
Onboarding is where somebody either works out what they have downloaded or closes it, and the paywall at the end of it is where they decide whether it is worth anything. Both are their own design problem, separate from the product they lead into, and I did not expect to spend as long on them as I have. Most of that time went on other people's apps rather than mine. Mobbin is where a lot of it happened: whole flows from apps in the same space, screen by screen, so you can see what order they put things in and how long they wait before asking for money. There is far more variation in that than I assumed. Ceram asks for contacts access on screen three and will not move past it, because contacts are the database and there is no app without them. Everything I know now about A/B testing and about the ways a small app can charge for itself came out of building these seven screens.
I am the easiest user this app will ever have
Building something for myself is simple. I know how it works because I decided how it works, and any feature I want is by definition a feature the user wants. None of that survives the first person who is not me. They have no idea what the app is for, no reason to hand their address book to a stranger, and no patience for a screen that asks them to think. So the work turned into finding out which of the things I had built are things anyone else would reach for, and getting everything else out of the way of them. The home screen is the whole argument: a greeting, one person, and one thing to do about them.
Anyone can build the basic version
A contacts app that stores notes and sends reminders is a weekend of work, and there will be others by the time this one ships. What is left after the feature list is whether the thing feels like anything. The first fork was whether to look like Apple Contacts. Matching it would have made Ceram read as part of the phone rather than as something bolted onto it, and it would also have made it trivial to clone, because nothing in a system look belongs to you. I drew a lot of versions in Paper before settling on monochrome and soft: no colour doing any work, nothing sharp, and deliberately neutral, so it is not asking anyone to adopt a personality before they will use it. What I am iterating on now is everything underneath that. The movement between screens, the way a note lands on a card, the line under the headline on the first screen that is drawn slightly crooked so one mark on it was not made by a ruler. The widget is the same argument in miniature: when there is nothing to do it says 'all caught up, nobody's waiting on a hello', because a widget showing you an empty list is a hole on your home screen.
Impact
The figure is mine and the sample is one person, so read it as what it is: I get in touch with people I would otherwise have drifted away from about half again as often as I did before. The change I notice more is smaller than that. There is no list in my notes app any more. I say the thing out loud once and it goes where it belongs, which is the whole of what I wanted when I started. What I do not have is anybody else's numbers. The next job is a waitlist and enough early testers to find out whether any of this holds for someone who did not build it.
Reflections
It is not finished and it will not be for a while, which I have stopped treating as a problem. What surprised me is how little of it was engineering. Brand, naming, saying what it does in one line, working out what an App Store page has to carry: I came to this thinking the app was the work and found the app is about half of it. Swift I learned because I had to. The rest I learned because there was nobody else to do it, and Apple's developer tooling turns out to go a long way past the part that makes a screen appear.
The best of it so far was the first time it ran on my own phone rather than in the simulator. That is a low bar and it did not feel like one. Having a project that works is one thing. Carrying it around, using it on people I actually know, and finding out where it is annoying is another, and almost every good decision since has come from that rather than from thinking about it.