Building an iOS app from scratch
Project
Backstock
Role
Gen AI
iOS Development
Product Design
Year
2026
Overview
You know that moment when you're standing in the grocery store aisle, staring at a jar of pickles, thinking "Do we have pickles at home?" For my partner and me, this wasn't occasional—it was every week. We'd buy duplicates of things buried in the cellar or forget essentials we thought we had.
As a product designer, I'm used to solving problems by designing interfaces. But this time I thought:
What if I just built it myself?
I'd never written Swift or shipped an iOS app, but I was curious.
Challenge accepted. I set out to build a working inventory app in one week.
Project & Process
I partnered with Claude AI as my technical guide and dove in to Cursor and Xcode.
Days 1-2: data architecture and SwiftUI basics. Days 3-4: camera integration, swipe gestures, and multi-location tracking.
Day 5: I hit a wall trying to style a simple toolbar button. Four approaches failed. I could have settled for default styling, but visual hierarchy matters. The fifth attempt worked. Perseverance pays off!
Days 6-7 were the most valuable. I installed the app on our phones and watched my partner use it. They didn't know settings = locations. They didn't set a primary storage location. They weren't sure which location swipes affected. Within 24 hours, I shipped fixes for all three issues. That's the power of building it yourself.
By day 7, we had a fully functional app: photo-based inventory, swipe gestures (right to add, left to remove), location transfers, smart onboarding, and polished animations.
No more duplicate pickles. No more "I thought we had that" moments.
Outcomes & Learnings
I went from zero Swift knowledge to a shipped iOS app in one week. The barrier between design and development isn't as high as I thought. It just requires curiosity and willingness to learn.
Watching real users revealed issues I'd never catch on my own. AI accelerated my learning curve without doing the thinking for me. And controlling the entire stack meant I could iterate from feedback to shipped fix in hours, not weeks.
This project proved I can build end-to-end solutions, not just design them. I can take ideas from concept to shipped product. That's a superpower I'm excited to use again.
