Almost? From Portfolio to Product

Almost? has a surprisingly long history for such a minimal app.

Origins: A Swift Showcase

Back in 2021 or 2022, I started a side project called KeepinOn. It began as a portfolio app, loosely inspired by Paul Hudson’s Hacking with Swift curriculum. The goal was to build something that could showcase my proficiency with Apple technologies, SwiftUI, CoreData, CloudKit, and eventually even social features and cross-platform support (everything but tvOS and, of course, visionOS, which didn’t exist yet). I had a full feature set built out, but I stopped short of releasing it. Life got in the way.

Attempt #2: The False Restart

A few years later, I tried to pick it up again. But a lot had changed, SwiftUI had moved on, some of the third-party integrations were broken or deprecated, and it just felt out of reach. I attempted a rewrite from scratch, but again, the effort ballooned. I put it down once more.

Attempt #3: Minimal and Published

Earlier this year, I returned to it again, but this time with a different goal: publish something small. I built a minimal version with only local storage and a basic tracker UI. I experimented with pointfreeco libraries, like SharingGRDB and StructuredQuery, but quickly found myself in a familiar trap: overengineering.

As usual, the fun parts of building, architectural decisions, abstraction layers, started to take over. And once again, it became hard to ship. But I pushed through. I stripped away everything unnecessary, published the app to the App Store, and called it done. Almost? (previously KeepinOn) was born.

From Utility to Reflection

But the app still felt like a stub. A featureless to-do tracker with no real value proposition. I realized that what I was really interested in wasn’t productivity tracking, it was reflection. Not what I did, but what I almost did, and what I could learn from it.

The result was a conceptual pivot. I redesigned the app around the idea of learning from failure and hesitation. I added mood tagging, favorites, emotional journaling. The app became personal.

A Firebase-Powered Rebuild

With a clearer scope in mind, I rebuilt the app from scratch:

✅ Real-time sync with Firestore
✅ Feature flags with Remote Config
✅ Optional Firebase Analytics
✅ SwiftUI-based architecture using @Observable and dependency injection
✅ Haptics, animations, and polish across iOS and iPadOS

I kept things tight and testable. I used GitHub Actions for CI, Firebase CLI for deploying rules and indexes, and a hand-coded landing page with marketing assets and privacy policy.

What I Learned

Don’t let architecture overshadow product
It’s fine to ship a small feature set if it’s cohesive
Firebase is a good fit for solo projects, but tradeoffs exist (especially around privacy)
Product positioning matters. Almost? resonates more than KeepinOn ever did