Shipaton 2025: Building Bubbles

Follow along with my journey of building Bubbles, a native Discourse client for iOS, iPadOS and macOS.

Each title is linked to the YouTube video that was shared as a video form of each update. Full playlist here. This blog post will be continually updated.

Part 1, July 12

Announcement of the app on social media
Going to try to use the Swift Open API Generator
App name: Bubbles
Sign up at https://gobubbles.app

Part 2, July 15

Deciding which architecture for the codebase (using packages or just keeping all the files in one Xcode project)
Figuring out how to use Swift Open API Generator

Part 3, July 25

Reading a ton of docs about how to do authentication with Discourse

Part 4, August 1

Thinking, what does this experience look like for an authenticated vs non-authenticated user?
Continue researching how does authentication work for Discourse

Part 5, September 7

I did a lot of incremental work during August, but was also super busy and didn’t really post a recap.

Ditched Swift Open API Generator 😭 due to yaml specification actually being difficult to know and use (the generator itself wasn’t really an issue)
Reduced scope to make version 0 (ZERO)
- Read the top 30 latest posts
- See the detail view of those posts
- No authentication (it’s coded, but you can’t do anything yet, so it’s commented out)
- Users can add however many “communities” to follow and switch between
Add monthly / yearly subscription using RevenueCat, and RevenueCat Paywalls is shown during onboarding
Sent the build to App Store Connect! For release right before iOS 26, and then immediately bump the minimum version number

Part 6, September 20

I failed.

I failed to meet many of my goals that I had set, and this is a reflection of that. I didn’t ship as many (or nearly any of the features I wanted) throughout the 2 months of Shipaton, but I still got somewhere.

Part 7, Sept 26

Updated the screenshots and my paywall to fix the rejection from Apple and finally shipped!
Update website https://gobubbles.app
Available to download now! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bubbles-for-discourse/id6751514227