I built three apps this week and put zero of them in the App Store

2026-07-29 · Yusuf Gadelrab

The App Store costs $99/year. I'm a broke CS student. So I built them as PWAs instead: you open a link on your phone, hit Share, hit Add to Home Screen, and it's on your homescreen with an icon. Works offline. No account. No backend. Your data never leaves your phone because there is no server to send it to.

Three of them, all things I actually needed:

TradeLog. A trading journal that thinks in R-multiples instead of dollars, because dollars lie to you about whether the process worked.

Cut. A weight tracker with an origin strip, so you see the whole arc instead of today's noise.

Fire. A daily ritual checklist that ends with one word when you finish: Shipped.

The thing nobody tells you about PWAs is how far they've come. Service workers, install prompts, offline caching, real app feel. I have no idea why more student projects aren't shipped this way.

All three are free, no signup, nothing to buy: https://yusuf-gadelrab.github.io/apps.html

If you install one, tell me what breaks. I'd rather hear it from you than find it in six months.