Happy Monday, everyone!

We made it to Issue #142! Thank you to everyone who read last week’s issue ❤️

Quick little update from my side! I’m most likely switching the email-sending side of Indie Dev Monday over from Kit to Substack. Kit (ConvertKit when I started) has been great, but it’s really built for bigger newsletters now, and Indie Dev Monday doesn’t need all that extra stuff… or the cost that comes with it.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be migrating everything over to Substack. Your email subscription will move automatically — you don’t have to do anything — and issues should still show up just like always, just in a slightly different format.

If you want to read in the Substack app or follow along there too, here’s the link:

👉 indiedevmonday.substack.com

But again: you don’t need to sign up or change anything. This site will remain as well. Just a little behind-the-scenes housekeeping to find a setup that fits me better and my attempts to grow Indie Dev Monday.

Okay, I think that’s mostly everything I needed to talk about today ☺️ As I mentioned in last week’s issue, with the help of AI I’ve been able to improve a lot of the automation around Indie Dev Monday. I have a new draft system where I can easily queue up indie devs so I should never feel like I’m falling behind. And some of the tedious parts (gathering all the data I need and formatting it) are now done by the robot, which means… my job is really just talking to indie devs and clicking the publish button 💪

Now… on to this week’s indie!

Today’s Spotlighted Indie Devs

📆 Today I’m featuring Chris Hefferman.

Chris is the creator of Game Hub, Drone Map, and Food Hygiene UK Ratings. Game Hub is a gaming companion app that helps you track your games, discover new releases, and stay on top of what’s coming next. Drone Map helps drone pilots discover and share flying spots, complete with no-fly zones, weather forecasts, and community-shared locations. Food Hygiene UK Ratings lets you check the hygiene scores of restaurants and takeaways before you eat there. And that’s just three of Chris’s TWELVE apps 🤯

I’m honestly blown away by how many apps Chris has shipped as a solo indie dev. From bird hides to truck stops to watch faces… the range is wild. But what’s really impressive is that each app solves a real problem without any bloat. They’re focused, useful, and clearly built by someone who cares about getting things right 💪

I’m so excited to learn how Chris thinks about building, how he ships so quickly, and what it takes to maintain 12 apps as a one-person indie studio. Check out Game Hub, Drone Map, and Food Hygiene UK Ratings and give Chris a follow! 😊

👉 Please make sure to follow them or support them anyway you can! 😇 I’m excited to share their indie dev stories.

Indie Dev

Chris Hefferman

Dorset, England

Creator of Game Hub, Drone Map, Food Hygiene UK Ratings, and 9 other apps

Game Hub
Drone Map
Food Hygiene UK Ratings

Chris Hefferman

Q&A

1) What is your name? Where do you live (city or general area)?

Hey 👋 I’m Chris and I live in a small town called Wimborne Minster in the UK. Wimborne is a quaint market town with coffee shops and cafe’s aplenty, and only 20 minutes away to the beautiful south coast.

2) Introduce yourself. What’s your background? Education? Past work? What do you enjoy inside and outside of tech?

An Apple fan-boy since the original iPhone, I never thought I’d have the privilege of working with Apple products for a living. After my wife and I got married in New Zealand in 2018 (in Hobbiton no less 🧙) I decided to focus on my then un-interesting career in Test Management to something I was more passionate about - learning to code!

As I hadn’t come from a conventional educational background in programming, I took the self teaching route, learning from Apple resources such as “Everyone Can Code” and Sean Allen’s amazing YouTube videos and courses.

After releasing two apps to the App Store (a Lord of the Rings quiz and a Google Adsense and AdMob tracker) and three years of late night coding alongside having two young children I landed my first job as an iOS Developer at a wonderful company called GCN in October 2021 who were excellent at teaching me the ropes.

I currently work full time as an iOS Developer, but still have the itch for a full time indie life!

Outside of tech I love spending time with my two kids and wife, gaming, flying my drone, playing the guitar now and again and of course, even more coding on my side projects! 🤦‍♂️

3) You currently have 12 different apps in the App Store — which is incredible. How did this portfolio come together? Are you someone who follows inspiration quickly, or was this intentional from the start?

Thanks! To be honest, at the start, I always thought I’d just have one or two apps, and focus on those - but as time went on, I had other ideas for apps I wanted to create and so (most of them) naturally came to be.

I say most, as a few are also a way for me to experiment with trends, or wanting to learn different technologies that might not necessarily fit into an existing app.

I love creating them, and I still get enjoyment when submitting new apps, and even new versions to the App Store, so although 12 does seem like a lot more than I was initially planning on setting out to create, I think there’s definitely many more in me!

4) With such a large collection of apps, how do you decide where to focus your time and energy? Do you follow data, user feedback, your own excitement, or something else?

It’s a mix of all the above really - I am definitely someone who can easily get fixated on a problem, or something I’m not particularly happy with in an existing app, and so I’ll focus my energy on that quite quickly.

I’ll also keep an eye on which of my apps are performing well and pivot to working on those to see if I can capitalise on that. I currently have a very large Trello board with different labels for each app so I can keep track of what needs doing across my portfolio, but then sometimes that goes out the window if I feel excited about a new app idea or feature that I want to work on.

Sometimes it’s just about working on something fun!

5) Game Hub — What inspired the initial concept? Was there a pain point or a moment where you thought: “This really needs to exist”?

This app, or at least, the idea of this app was what got me into coding in the first place - so it’s definitely an app that is special to me.

In 2015 I came up with the idea for the app as nothing really existed in the App Store at the time that combined sorting out your gaming backlog, along with social aspects of reviewing and rating games. Unfortunately, at the time I didn’t know how to code! At that time in my life my first child was born and so I put any learning to code on hold as having children is a bit of shell-shock at the beginning!

Fast forward seven years and after working as an by 2022 I had been working as an iOS Dev and I finally knew how to make the app 😆. I was itching to start working on some side projects again, and so I decided to put it into action.

As well as that we were leaning towards a VIPER architecture at work, and I wanted a project at home that I could use to learn more about that architecture, and so that was really the motivation by that point - to work on something outside of work and something I was passionate about, but also teach myself more about VIPER.

6) Game Hub — What’s been the most challenging part of building or maintaining it, either technically or in terms of content/community?

I think the most challenging part for me until very recently was the general architecture of it.

As mentioned, when I set out to make it in 2022 it was written using VIPER, however fast forward three years and I wanted to re-write the entire app’s architecture away from VIPER towards something easier to manage for me.

This must have taken around 2 months for me to complete, and the apps binary still has a lot of old un-used code in it that I keep meaning to rip out, but it’s definitely a lot simpler to reason about now without the use of Presenters, Interactors and Repositories.

I don’t want to get into an architecture discussion (always a hot topic!) but at the time it served me very well at work to learn more about VIPER, so I’m not knocking it at all, but I think for a side-project it was a little overkill and slowed down my development process.

7) Drone Map — What led you to create a mapping tool specifically for drone pilots? Were there features or limitations in existing options that pushed you toward your own solution?

I’m a keen drone pilot myself and love finding new places to fly, or visiting one’s I’ve been to before with great scenery. I found myself jotting these places down in a note, but one thing I thought would be cool is if there was somewhere a community of drone enthusiasts could share places they’d flown on a map for others to see.

I’m still working towards building a community, but so far users have shared over 100 spots across the world, which is super exciting. I’ve recently added some new features such as no-fly zones, weather forecasts and saving other users’ places to your own list to visit to make it even more useful for users.

8) Drone Map — What has surprised you the most while working on geospatial data, flight zones, or mapping features?

I think one thing I struggled to grasp the most was “clustering” the locations so that your UI doesn’t fall over when it has so much data to present. It took me quite a while to fine tune my work so that it felt like a smooth user experience, but also a helpful one by not clustering too much.

9) Food Hygiene UK Ratings — This is such a practical app with real-world impact. What motivated you to build it, and what’s your approach to keeping the data trustworthy and up to date?

Thanks! The motivation for me building this app was to help my wife on I deciding where to eat when we go out! My wife had a kidney transplant 14 years ago, and so although generally well at the moment, we do need to be careful of the hygiene of places where we eat so that she doesn’t get unwell.

In the UK we have a government run agency called the Food Standards Agency that all establishments by law that offer food here have to be rated a score between 0 and 5 on the general food hygiene standard as well as some slightly more in-depth measurements such as confidence in management, hygiene & safety and structural requirements.

The agency offer their data via a very easy to use API, and although there were already some apps that offered this information, for me they looked a little dated. I took this app as a small test bed into using iOS 26’s Liquid Glass (love it or hate it!) and wanted to create something simple but useful to use.

10) Food Hygiene UK Ratings — Are there any features or future improvements you’re especially excited about?

My wife and I are foodies and love eating at nice places whenever life with two young children allows (which isn’t that often!). However, I had hoped to integrate some sort of Michelin Star rating to the establishments as well. Sadly I’m not sure that’s going to be feasible as I don’t see an API available for me to use.

I have also considered the idea of integrating ratings from Trip Advisor, which there is definitely an API for. The downside of this might be that it takes the app away from its original intent of being a simple easy place to find official ratings and so it’s something I might consider A/B testing.

Food for thought! - Sorry, I couldn’t resist 🫠

11) You also have nine other apps — from bird hides to truck stops to watch faces. Is there a common theme behind the kinds of problems you’re drawn to solving?

I’d say my apps generally try to draw a line between some really useful applications, to also throwing a few of them at the wall and seeing what sticks. I want to make sure all my apps are reputable though, and useful in someway to my users.

I take a lot of pride in great UI as I definitely think that is where my strength lies and to help with this I have created myself a shared package that I use in all my apps to keep things looking on brand and helps me make things re-usable to speed up development!

12) Across your less-active apps, is there a small feature or detail you’re particularly proud of that people might overlook?

One of my less actively developed apps I have is an app for MiniDisc Player enthusiasts.

I’m a kid from the late 80’s / 90’s and I absolutely loved my MiniDisc player and I wanted to create an app that recreated that tactile / physical feeling of using one.

I tirelessly designed four separate players using SwiftUI shapes, borders, shadows and overlays to present the most realistic looking players I could achieve. It picks up your Apple Music playlists, and displays them as discs that the user can drag into the player, which then gives the user some really nice haptic feedback as if the disc is being read by the player.

As well as this there is some UI on the player display such as the battery level (which mirror’s your iPhone or iPad’s battery level), a small spinning disc icon which was painful to create in SwiftUI and also some very subtle reflections on the screen. I also even allowed the user to drag the metal slider on the discs themselves which snap back into their original place when the drag gesture ends with a really satisfying haptic feedback and audible “click”!

I doubt much of this is noticeable in isolation to the user, but I think it definitely adds to the overall immersion of using a MiniDisc player and it was important to me to get right, and I loved playing with SwiftUI and pushing it to it’s limits!

13) What does your tech stack look like across all 12 projects? Do you have shared components or internal tools that help you move quickly?

My tech stack looks very similar across my apps as I like to build quickly, and re-use where possible, and so keeping to things I am familiar with enables this.

I have my own Swift package that I pull into most of my apps which saves time on me not having to create reusable views and ensures where needed that my apps stick to a brand. It also means that when I learn new things or improve my UI and UX such as onboarding or paywalls, I can simply update my package once and then update across the apps and it’s done.

For any user data persistence I’m a Firebase devotee. I love how easy it is to set up, how simple the code is to read and also the speed in which you get the data. I appreciate it has some downsides and I wish sub-collections could be fetched with the same read request as the top level collection, but it’s a trade off I’ve been happy to make.

Other notable tools I use in my app development include:

14) What has been the hardest and most rewarding part of indie life for you so far?

The hardest part definitely for me is getting the right balance in my life on spending time on my apps. I work full time as an iOS Developer, and right now do not make anywhere near enough revenue from my apps to become a full-time indie developer (the dream for sure!).

Therefore balancing my time between full time work, spending time with my family, keeping on top of life admin, and not wanting to take myself away to spend all my spare time on my apps to chase the full time indie dream is challenging.

That niggling feeling when I’m relaxing watching a movie, or playing a video game, that I should be doing something with my app portfolio can be hard to suppress, but I also want to make sure I don’t get fatigued with app development. So I do find that hard to balance.

15) What’s next for Game Hub, Drone Map, Food Hygiene UK Ratings, or any of your other apps? Anything you can share?

My general app lifecycle of switching between creating something new, or honing and refining my existing apps. I’m currently in a honing mode, and I’ve spent the last month really brushing up the user experience on Game Hub.

I also want to experiment with marketing, or rather, feel like I probably should! At the moment, Other than ASO research, I do very little in terms of marketing and it’s not quite getting the results I would like to see and so I think some social media marketing could also help drive some downloads to my apps.

Unfortunately I’ve always been terrible at social media - I feel weird posting about my own work, and I think I need to work on distancing myself from that feeling and just putting it out there to see what lands.

16) Are there any indie developers you think readers should follow or keep an eye on?

Absolutely! The iOS Developer community is such a welcoming and supportive place, and I genuinely don’t think I’d be doing what I do now for a living if it weren’t for many of those supportive developers.

Firstly a big thank you to you for giving me the opportunity to take part in the newsletter - it’s been a staple in my selection of newsletters, and I’m super glad you’re in a place where you feel you can bring it back.

In no other particular order, I’d love to highlight the following people:

I’m sorry if I’ve missed anyone I’ve interacted with over the years, but the iOS Developer community is brilliant, so thank you to everyone!

Thank you to everybody who made it to this footer! You either spent the time to read or took the effort to scroll 😊

Make sure to visit https://indiedevmonday.com/subscribe to get an email of future issues!

And go to Twitter and give @IndieDevMonday a follow… or multiple follows if you manage more than one Twitter account 😜