Case study
A Swiss app for pet owners that I designed, built and published on my own. It is my own product, not a commission: here is what it really took.
The need
Looking after an animal is often shared, and the information ends up scattered: a booklet here, a message there, a vaccination date nobody can find.
Pawinia brings it together for Switzerland:
One codebase runs the website, the Android app and the iPhone app.
What got in the way
Google's 14-day test. A new personal account has to have the app tested by 12 people for 14 days. My first testers installed it, opened it once and forgot it. Rather than send a weak application, I started again with people who really used it. The app went public on 3 October 2026.
The slowness. The app took 0.8 to 1.9 seconds to respond to each tap. Measuring it showed why: the servers were in Washington and the database in Frankfurt, so each page crossed the Atlantic 10 to 20 times. With everything in Frankfurt, the response dropped below 0.2 seconds.
Google was not indexing the site. In September, 50 of 87 pages were not indexed, because a bug pointed the subpages at the home page. Search Console helped find it and fix it.
Apple. Opening the developer account took 17 days, and the iPhone version was submitted in October. I tell the whole journey in this article.
What I took away
My first testers explored almost every screen on their first visit, and most of them never came back. That taught me more about what to fix than any review.
It is the first question I ask on an app project: why would someone open this on an ordinary Tuesday? The rest, accounts, stores and testing, I now know how to do.
An Android and iPhone app costs CHF 14,000 with me and takes 8 to 12 weeks. See the prices.