When Getting Sherlocked Leads to Something Better: The TranslateKit Journey

A candid story about resilience in indie app development — and how the worst day of your developer life can sometimes lead to building something better.

When Apple introduced String Catalogs at WWDC 2023, I felt my heart sink. I had just spent a full year building RemafoX, an Xcode extension for app localization, only to see much of its functionality become part of Xcode itself. As an indie developer, this was a significant setback — RemafoX was meant to be my flagship app after going indie full-time in 2022.

Yet, as I dug deeper into String Catalogs, I realized something interesting: Apple’s deep SwiftUI integration offered possibilities that weren’t achievable through Xcode extensions. Instead of fighting the tide, I decided to embrace it. Over a single weekend, I built a simple tool that could parse String Catalogs and handle machine translations. That tool became TranslateKit.

An Unexpected Success Story

What started as a weekend project for personal use quickly became my most successful app to date. Developers worldwide embraced TranslateKit’s simplicity and efficiency. The feedback exceeded my expectations for such a…