An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
Programming can be treated like home cooking: instead of chasing massive markets, developers build tiny, deeply personal apps for themselves, their families, or a handful of friends. Commenters share examples ranging from custom recipe and note-taking tools to family social networks and home-automation scripts, arguing these “home‑cooked” projects are uniquely fulfilling, privacy‑respecting, and often far better aligned with their users’ real needs than commercial products. At the same time, they note how modern mobile platforms, app store rules, and constant OS changes make such small-scale software harder to distribute and maintain, even as AI tools are lowering the barrier to creating it.
Home‑cooked apps & tiny audiences
- Strong appreciation for the idea of building apps for a “total addressable market” of a handful of people.
- Many see it as more fulfilling than anonymous mass‑market work and liken it to cooking for family vs running a restaurant.
- Several argue this mindset revives an older era where people routinely built software “for themselves first.”
Personal tools and family infrastructure
- Numerous stories of tiny, bespoke tools:
- Family recipe sharer that grew over years.
- Tabs/expense sheets with small delightful touches (e.g., dog photos).
- Home automation scripts, laundromat and cat‑litter notifiers, shop‑hours viewers, train delay checkers, fantasy draft tracker, beer inventory, journaling shortcuts, etc.
- Some run small “home suites”: self‑hosted chat, calendars, forums, media libraries, knowledge bases, notes, and personal “everything apps” replacing email, calendar, and more.
- Users report big quality‑of‑life and even mental‑health benefits from tools tailored exactly to them.
When personal apps become products
- A few projects for friends/family accidentally became commercial products via word of mouth, eventually charging to cover server costs.
- Others explicitly refuse to generalize or commercialize, valuing purity of “for me only.”
- There is debate over open‑sourcing: some want code shared as a learning base, others prefer to keep messy, highly personal code private.
Platform friction & app longevity
- iOS/TestFlight is a recurring pain point: code signing, profiles, reviews, 90‑day expirations, and the annual developer fee make tiny private apps harder than they should be.
- Some work around this by using web apps, Raspberry Pis, tunnels/VPNs, or Android sideloading instead of app stores.
- Mobile OS policies (minimum SDKs, store rules) mean apps are rarely “done”; they require maintenance just to stay installable.
Social and adoption challenges
- Technically, building is easy; socially, convincing friends/family to adopt a new tool is hard, especially against entrenched messaging apps.
- At work, small internal tools can be powerful but often rot once their lone maintainer leaves or teams are reorganized.
AI, tools, and accessibility
- Some feel modern AI and massive compute make “real” apps the domain of big companies.
- Others argue LLMs and better tooling actually lower the barrier for individuals to build sophisticated personal software.
- There is a broader desire for HyperCard‑like, malleable, or no‑code environments so non‑professionals can “learn to cook” in software too.