How I built a production mobile app boilerplate in two weeks without writing a line of frontend code
Eight months ago my wife and I had twins.
The baby tracker apps on the App Store weren't designed for multiples. Most were paid. The free ones were missing things. None of them thought about two babies at the same time — one timer, one log, one feeding. So I built my own. TwinLog is a free tracker for twins and multiples ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgit.babytracker]) . My wife uses it every day. It just launched on the Play Store with almost no users and I'm genuinely fine with that — it was built because we needed it, not because I wanted users.
After shipping it I noticed something obvious in hindsight: every app starts with the same work. Authentication, payments, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines. Two weeks of scaffolding before you write a single line of what your app actually does. TwinLog has none of that — no auth because I didn't have time, no payments because it's free, no web frontend. I skipped everything non-essential to ship fast.
But a commercial app can't skip those things. And I wasn't going to rebuild them from scratch every time.
