Robin Kanatzar
iOS & Android engineer and accessibility advocate, building a portfolio of small apps (and flipping a few) between diaper changes.
August 1, 2026 · The house is fine, and there’s a new app
Good news first: the wildfires near Robin are contained, and her house is still standing. 🎉
The ASO experiment is still in the waiting phase. MyCommute downloads are up, but the new users are perfectly happy on the free tier, so this week she’s adding more analytics to figure out how to make Premium worth upgrading to.
Users are great, but a few paid users are even better!
The evacuation also turned into an app. She couldn’t find a fire tracker that gave her the alerts she actually needed, so she built one, and she’s cleaning it up to enter in the Shipaton 2026 Peace Prize category.
Hopefully someone else out there living near a wildfire will find it useful, too. Wish me luck!
July 26, 2026 · Shipping from evacuation housing
A hectic week: wildfires and evacuations in France, with Robin working out of temporary evacuation housing.
Thank goodness indie devs can work from anywhere, even temporary evacuation housing! Haha.
She still got the work in. Updates to MyCommute, plus ASO improvements for both MyCommute and her Blackjack trainer. She hired a consultant to find the best markets and keywords, so instead of blindly targeting 30 countries she can focus on the 5 to 10 where she can actually rank organically. The reason she paid for help is a very indie problem: the good ASO research tools are enterprise-priced.
Now comes the part nobody enjoys.
Now I’m at the hardest part: waiting. Hopefully here in 2-6 weeks, I’ll see a boost in app store rankings and organic downloads. Fingers crossed!
July 20, 2026 · Meet Robin
Robin is an iOS and Android engineer and accessibility advocate who started her indie journey in January 2026. She’s a new mom, and as she puts it, she’s often shipping app updates between diaper changes.
Instead of betting everything on one app, she’s building a portfolio of small utility apps, and experimenting with “app flipping”: buying an under-optimized app that’s already on the store, making it better, and growing it from there.
Right now her focus is MyCommute, a traffic monitoring app she’s committed to updating every single day until it’s in a state she’s proud of. (If you have a regular commute, she’d love to know what you’d want fixed or added.)
What she’s racing toward: getting her portfolio into a strong position before her second child arrives in September.
It’s a race against time, and I might be that person who brings her computer and Fable 5 into the delivery room. Wish me luck.