MEET THE DEVELOPER
What started as learning to build something for myself slowly turned into TheCozyDev — a growing collection of apps built around one idea: software can be useful without feeling overwhelming.
I’m Em. I’m not from a traditional development background. Most of this has been learned one evening, one bug and one slightly-too-late coding session at a time, alongside my 9–5. Somehow, a few hundred hours later, people can now download things I made from the App Store.
FROM FIRST COMMIT TO APP STORE
The shipped apps matter, but so do the experiments, mistakes and quiet decisions that made them possible.
Early 2026
I started learning Swift and SwiftUI by making things rather than waiting until I felt ready. The first serious project became Cozy Pom: a simple Pomodoro timer shaped by one question — what would productivity look like if it didn’t constantly demand more from you?
14 June 2026
The timer had grown into focus and break sessions, themes, quests, journalling, moods, achievements, statistics, ambient sounds and persistence. My checklist changed from features to privacy, TestFlight, screenshots, metadata and submission. It stopped feeling like a coding exercise and started feeling like a product.
26 June 2026
Apple approved my first App Store app. What began as a small focus timer was now something anybody could download: no ads, no accounts and no subscription — just a calmer place to focus. Later estimates put more than 400 hours into Cozy Pom, and I still wasn’t finished.
11 July 2026
Less than three weeks later, v1.4 went live. The journal became part of focus sessions, stats were redesigned, achievements and ranks grew, ambient sounds arrived, and Live Activities brought the timer to the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island. Fixing one SwiftUI bug occasionally created three more. Welcome to app development.
July 2026
Shipping Cozy Pom did not make me want a break. It made me want to build another app. A deliberately tiny calculator idea called MochiCalc began taking shape — and, much like Cozy Pom, it did not stay tiny for long.
27 July 2026
The idea grew into an everyday money companion designed to soften small financial moments: sale calculations, bill splitting, savings goals, themes and recent money moments. The name changed because the idea had outgrown the calculator it started with.
10 August 2026
thecozydev.co.uk went live. Until then, TheCozyDev mostly existed through the apps, X posts and everything happening behind the scenes. The first site was not perfect — that is why it is being rebuilt now — but it made this feel bigger than simply learning to code.
18 August 2026
My second iOS app reached the App Store less than two months after Cozy Pom. MochiCalc had become a fully released money app with its own identity. Two completely separate apps had travelled from ideas on my Mac to something other people could download.
August 2026
Questory began as an ultimate gaming journal and evolved into a calm place for games, quests and memories. Lumarii pulled in another direction: private journalling, reflection and slowing down long enough to notice. By 29 August, Lumarii had been built, tested and submitted to Apple while Questory remained in active development.
29 August 2026
The original website grew like the apps did: add something here, add something there, then realise you have created one enormous page. This new home gives every app, journal, experiment, mockup and roadmap room to breathe — including the messy decisions and ‘WHY IS SWIFT DOING THAT?’ moments between idea and shipped.
STILL BUILDING
I didn’t start this because I had years of software engineering experience. I started because I wanted to make something. So I’m still learning, still shipping, still breaking things, still fixing them — and still trying to make something a tiny bit better than yesterday.
One cozy commit at a time. ☕️💜