My friends and I have been hacking on http://dateit.com for a while.
It's an event planning app (works best on iOS and android, but there is a web app) with lots of fun features:
We started working on this all the way back during the Covid lockdown when we wanted to capture that "facebook events" experience without the facebook.
It's grown into something much more than our original idea. Most of the features are free and we have a fair pricing model that doesn't nickel-and-dime you like many of the competing apps do. Would love your feedback!
Apple provides a lot of things for free that you'd otherwise have to pay for (maintain, pay for, and/or scale) yourself. A big one that comes to mind is maps API and geocoding. This is all free on iOS, if you use the API from a native app.
I maintain an app on both iOS, Android, and the web, and the google maps API costs (used on Android and Web) add up really fast.
>the google maps API costs (used on Android [...]) add up really fast.
The regular Maps SDK on Android is entirely free. There are very few reasons to even end up paying API costs, you're either running afoul of their terms of service, or wanting to use dynamic maps for some reason. My company has 15M monthly users on a _very_ maps heavy app and pays absolutely nothing on Android.
Serving tiles sucks. Generating tiles sucks even more. In CPU time, in storage, in network. It's really not something you want to handle yourself, and most of the OSM alternatives end up basically only preloading a small area. Their vector renderer's performance is also somewhat bad.
I wonder what Apple is using for production monitoring, observability, and performance profiling with swift applications on Linux. In my experience this is one of the key missing pieces in Swift server ecosystem.
You can link against jemalloc, and use google perftools to get heap and CPU profiles, but it's challenging to make good use of them especially with swifts method mangling and aggressive inlining.
A social event planning app to capture the fun my friends and I had with facebook events, but without the facebook. We have native apps for iOS, Android and the web. dateit has a generous free features compared to competing apps (SMS invites, photo upload, customization).
My cofounder and I have fully bootstrapped this and now it mostly self sustains which is an exciting achievement!
It's been a fun project to hack on for the last couple years and spawned several interesting side quests. For example, the backend is in Swift (as I started as an iOS dev) so that has been an exciting space to work in.
It's grown into something much more than our original idea. Most of the features are free and we have a fair pricing model that doesn't nickel-and-dime you like many of the competing apps do. Would love your feedback!