We Don't Want to Build an Empire
When is good, good enough? What is humane app design?
Every business is supposed to want more. More users, more markets, more reach, more proof that the line is moving up. Growth gets treated like gravity, the one direction a serious company is allowed to go.
Enough Is a Real Number
Stand still and you are dying. Decline to scale and you are unserious. The vocabulary has already decided the case: traction, runway, hockey stick, total addressable market. A market is addressable the way a letter is addressable. It exists to be reached into.
We want to step off that by making the best simple apps for iPhone.
Not because ambition is bad. Not because money is dirty. Because we did the arithmetic, and enough turned out to be a real number.
A Living, Not A Killing
There is an amount of money that lets the apps be made well, keeps the lights on, keeps the work honest, and keeps us recognizable to ourselves. Past that, the returns stop being measured in dollars. They show up somewhere else: a morning that belongs to you, work you can stand behind without a footnote, the satisfaction of making a thing, handing it over, and watching it do exactly what you said it would do.
Most people racing toward more passed enough a long time ago. They did not stop because nobody told them they could. Stopping has been made to feel like failure. We are telling ourselves we can stop. We are calling that the goal.
We Are Not Trying To Become a Machine
The trouble with an empire is that it has to keep eating.
Growth is not a place you arrive. It is something you feed, forever, in larger portions. And when a company has used up the honest sources of growth, when the product is good, when the people who need it mostly have it, the hunger does not stop. It turns to the one supply always close at hand.
The user.
Attention Is Not Free
Sometimes the most humane Apple apps without notifications are the ones that understand silence as a feature, not a failure.
Your attention, metered and sold. Your patience, taxed by one more notification, one more upsell, one more screen between you and the thing you came to do.
Your data, quietly gathered. Your money, no longer asked for plainly, but pulled through plans, tiers, trials, defaults, and little frictions designed to make leaving harder than staying.
How Good App Tools Go Bad & The Tuesday Problem
We have watched this happen to tools we loved. It never happens all at once. No one wakes up on a Tuesday and decides to betray the people who trust them. It happens one reasonable-sounding target at a time.
A notification, because engagement is low. A streak, because retention matters. A subscription where it makes no moral sense, because recurring revenue is easier to admire on a chart. Each step can be defended. The sum is a thing that studies you, interrupts you, and rents you back your own attention.
The apps did not get worse because every person inside them got worse. They got worse because the structure pointed every incentive away from the user, and people followed the slope.
What We Give Up
That is why distance matters.
The people who build the thing you use often answer to someone who is not you: a board, a growth team, a metric, a market story, a next round. The farther a decision sits from the person it lands on, the easier it is to make the one that hurts them.
Fragment the work enough and responsibility disappears. The designer followed the brief. The brief followed the metric. The metric followed the board. The board followed the market. Spread across enough hands, a thing no one would do to your face gets done to you, and everyone goes home clean.
We are choosing the opposite of distance.
Not Rich, Not Pretending, Working to Keep the Lights On
So yes, we are giving things up.
The windfall. The version of the story where this gets enormous. The upside that comes from treating trust as a resource to be optimized. We are not rich people pretending not to care about money. We care about making a living. We care about rent, groceries, servers, devices, time, and the ordinary costs of staying alive long enough to keep making things.
But making a living is not the same as building a machine that must keep taking.
Making a Living Is Enough
There is a fair gain. There is honest payment for useful work. There is a price that lets the maker continue without turning the user into fuel. That is the line we care about. Not poverty as virtue. Not scale as destiny. A living.
What we keep is harder to put on a slide.
The apps as they are: tools with a philosophy behind them doing one job and stepping aside. The freedom to look at a finished thing and call it finished. The ability to say no to a feature that would make a number better and a person’s day worse. The plain arrangement where someone makes a useful tool, someone else pays a fair price, and that is the end of it.
No trap. No tab running in the dark.
We do not want to build an empire. We want to make a few things that genuinely help, charge something that maybe gets us to keep the lights on, and stop when the work is done.
Not a killing. A living. That allows us to make focused everyday apps that do their work and leave the rest of your life alone.
Perseverance Furthers
And we think, quietly and stubbornly, that if more software were made this way, by people close enough to their own work to answer for it, the screen in your hand might start to feel a little more like it was on your side.
That is the whole ambition.
It is allowed.
Our current apps are listed on the products page.
The main Myworkingmemory site is at myworkingmemory.ai.