Dutch app developer in Thailand. Dad. Building apps since I was 18, now RadioStation, NightEar and more. Follow along for what I'm making each day.
Thailand
Joined November 2024
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Main focus right now is RadioStation, my free live radio app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch and Android. Most of my day goes to getting it in front of radio lovers and answering what they ask. Best response so far: British radio fans on Reddit. radiostation.live
App Store lesson from today's RadioStation work. I tried to add German to the app's Christmas Radio in-app event, and Apple said no: once an event is approved, it takes no new languages. So it keeps its English and Dutch texts, and next year the languages go in before review.
Today's RadioStation job: the App Store promotional text for version 2.5, now live in all 50 App Store languages. Apple allows 170 characters per language. I built every line from the app's own translated labels, so the store page uses the same words people see inside the app.
Tuesday evening I sent RadioStation 2.5 to Apple review for iPhone, iPad and Mac, one minute apart. iPhone and iPad went live yesterday afternoon. The Mac build is still in review this morning, so Mac users stay on 2.4 for now. Same version, separate queues.
New in RadioStation on iPhone and iPad: a Prayer genre with 189 nonstop stations in 9 groups, from Catholic and Orthodox to Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and Umbanda and Candomblé. I checked every stream by hand. On iOS or iPadOS 26 you can also pick one to wake up to.
Release day: RadioStation 2.5 is out on iPhone and iPad. My favourite part is small. Every alarm now has its own Fade in choice: leave it on and your station comes up softly over one minute, set it to Off and it plays at full volume right away. The alarm needs iOS or iPadOS 26.
A test recording caught this one today. While a station was still tuning in, my radio app flashed a "Go live" button for a split second and the screen jumped 18 points. The stream was only buffering, never behind live. Now the player shows no status until the sound starts.
UI tests caught a sneaky one in RadioStation this morning. At the largest accessibility text size on an iPhone SE, the United States tile in Countries was drawn on screen but VoiceOver could not reach it. At those sizes the list is now one plain column, and every tile reads out.
Second pass on the RadioStation now playing screen today. Close to half the station names in the catalog need two lines, so the name now always keeps room for two and the controls stop shifting. Stations that send an ad marker instead of a song title now just show no title.
A listener told me RadioStation jumps around when you switch stations. Fair point: the song line only existed once a title arrived, so every switch shrank the card and moved the dial. Fixed today: that line keeps its room now. It ships in the update after the one in review.
RadioStation went live on Apple TV this morning. On the TV the big tuning dial has the focus: swipe on the remote and the scale slides through the static to the next station, which starts playing when the dial rests. Favourites come over from the iPhone through iCloud.
Bug hunt today. A listener said RadioStation's CarPlay icon never showed on an iPhone XS with iOS 18. On a simulator it appeared 3 seconds after install. Take the CarPlay entitlement out of the build and it vanishes, just like the report. Real iOS 18 phone test still to do.
New name, same account. I'm Bart, a Dutch app developer living in Thailand. Today I'm moving my baby monitor app NightEar to its own domain, nightear.app, with a bigger site and a blog. From now on I post here what I'm building, day by day.
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I haven’t taken a day off, now I am finally swinging in my hammick I realize maybe I could stay a day in there with my drink and zaa 😂
I just have that exact feeling right now when I was 18 and start developing Iphone 15 years ago, we are about to take-off 🚀