Blogs

Last Week Last week was almost entirely a loss to COVID. I had a high fever, recovered from that part quickly after seeing a doctor, and then spent the rest of the week without much energy or motivation to work. The only meaningful progress was a small update to Shokken’s public-facing sites: the product site and the guest status site where guests join a waitlist and review menus. Both updates made it to integration, but I deliberately left them out of production because they still needed testing....

Last Week Last week was the first real door-to-door marketing run for Shokken. I visited six restaurants around Las Vegas and learned quickly that a busy restaurant with wait complaints is not automatically a good early customer. Some restaurants already have established waitlist systems. Others have seasonal demand, hard-to-reach managers, or guest-facing language needs that Shokken does not yet handle well enough. The most useful outcome was a clearer target: restaurants with real waitlist pain, lightweight or manual tooling, and an owner or manager who is open to trying something new....

Last Week Last week was about configuration management. Shokken is now public on both Android and iOS, which means every release has to account for the awkward split between mobile app binaries and backend deployments. Backend changes can go live quickly. App changes have to pass through Google Play or the App Store, and users do not necessarily update immediately. That created a practical problem for new feature work. If the app contains frontend code for a feature before the backend is ready, I need a way to keep that feature hidden without blocking unrelated bug fixes....

Last Week Last week was about a tooling decision that became more important than I expected. Shokken was already live on both Google Play and the iOS App Store in the United States, and the first organic signups had appeared. The next visible milestone was supposed to be marketing: finishing the pitch, testing the flyer flow, and starting real conversations with restaurants. But the development pipeline was getting in the way....

Last Week Last week was the first week where Shokken felt less like an app under construction and more like a product that needed to be sold. Android was live on Google Play. iOS was live on the App Store. The first post-approval iOS update moved through review quickly, which made the release process feel less frightening than the initial approval loop. I also finished the first real short-form marketing video and got the physical flyer into a shape I could actually hand to a restaurant....

Last Week Last week was about marketing preparation after the App Store approval finally landed. Android was already live on Google Play, iOS had cleared review, and the center of gravity moved away from building the MVP toward making Shokken look trustworthy enough for real operators to evaluate. That meant working on the surfaces around the app: the website, app store listings, screenshots, Google/search presence, social profiles, and physical flyers for local outreach....

Last Week Last week was the milestone I had been waiting on: Shokken finally cleared Apple’s App Store review. Android was already live on Google Play, but iOS had been stuck behind repeated review rejections around the short-duration paid access products. After deleting the old one-day and three-day product records from App Store Connect, the review path finally cleared. That approval changes the shape of the work. The MVP development effort is effectively done....

Last Week Last week was about simplifying the iOS review surface. After several rounds of App Store review friction over Shokken’s one-day and three-day paid access options, I removed the short-duration products from the submitted build and kept the iOS purchase path to a monthly subscription. That was not the product shape I originally wanted, but it made the submission easier for Apple to evaluate and reduced the chance that the same subscription-duration argument would keep blocking the app....

Last Week Last week stepped away from the App Store review loop and focused on how I manage AI coding agents while building Shokken. The practical point was simple: agents can be useful, but they have to be treated like contributors, not trusted like deterministic tools. Clear instructions, tests, CI, and review are what make their output usable. That tooling discipline still matters, but this week moved straight back to the iOS submission path....

Last Week Last week was about accepting the practical shape of the App Store review problem. Apple had rejected the iOS submission again over the short-duration access products, and after a direct call with App Review, the path forward became clearer: stop defending the non-renewing subscription interpretation and rebuild the one-, two-, and three-day passes as consumable in-app purchases. That work still needs to happen. Android remains live on Google Play, iOS is still blocked by App Store review, and the short-pass conversion will touch RevenueCat, the paywall, the app code, the backend, and the database....