Projects Case study
Blue News Network: an iOS app, and the site that ships with it.
A native iOS news app, live on the App Store, built alongside its own marketing website. Two surfaces, one product: the app people install and the site that introduces it.
The product
Blue News Network is a native iOS news app, built in Swift and live on the App Store. It's the smaller of my shipped apps by scope — and a useful case study anyway, because of how it shipped.
Two surfaces, one product
Most indie apps launch with nothing but an App Store listing. BNN launched with two surfaces: the app itself, and a hand-built marketing site that introduces it on the open web — fast, indexable, and findable by people who will never browse the App Store catalog. The site and the app were designed as one product, so the store page and the web page tell the same story.
Trained, not just prompted
The newscast text BNN generates comes from a small LLM running entirely on-device — and not an off-the-shelf one. I trained Qwen3 1.7B specifically for this app's output format (LoRA with MLX, distilled from a frontier teacher, quantized to GGUF); it went from failing the app's own quality gates 80% of the time to passing 100%. The full pipeline is its own case study.
What shipping both taught me
An app is a product; a product needs a front door. Building the web surface alongside the native app is now my default for anything I ship — it's the same instinct behind this portfolio being hand-written HTML. When you hire me for an iOS app, you get the surrounding product thinking too: the listing, the landing page, the whole path a stranger takes from "never heard of it" to "installed it."