About ten years ago I made my first phone app. It was a simple browser for d6gaming.org, the wiki for my Amar role-playing game. A glorified web view. It worked, barely, and I never built anything more complex. Real apps — with their own logic, their own data, their own storage on the device always felt like a mountain I wasn’t going to climb.
Then tasks happened, in a single evening. And once that mountain turned out to be a tiny hill, I kept walking.
A few days later I have seven apps on my phone. Tools I actually need. tasks and hyperlist for my Hyperlists. relay, which forwards my WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, SMS and Discord straight into kastrup on the laptop and lets me reply from there. That made it possible to realize my dream from 2007… a true communication hub. And with the app I could finally retire the headless Firefox I’d been babysitting for that.
astro (an app clone of my astro TUI) tells me when to pull out my scopes and what to view. It covers the weather, the observing conditions and my telescope gear. watchit browses films and series and where it streams. amardice is a dice roller for Amar that knows the full crit and fumble tables. And finally xrpn, a pocket HP-41 that even runs my old FOCAL programs.
The trick is that almost none of the interesting code is Kotlin. Kotlin is generall too heavy for my taste. Each app is a thin shell over a shared Rust core — the very same logic that runs the desktop Fe₂O₃ tools, compiled for the phone and bridged into Kotlin with UniFFI. So the phone and the laptop compute the same answers, because they run the same code. The data rides over Syncthing: my todo list, my telescope & gear catalogue, my calculator programs. No Google account, no cloud middleman, no account at all.
None of this is on any app store. It may never be. These are built for an audience of one. That’s the whole point. I don’t have to fit my workflow to someone else’s app; the app fits me. When something annoys me, I open Claude Code, describe the change, and it’s done before the itch is gone.
Ten years ago a single web-view app was the edge of what I would make. This week it was an afternoon’s idea each. The mountain didn’t move. The tools did.
The whole suite lives at isene.org/nomad.
Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/05/Nomad.html