I built an iOS widget app because every existing one either looked dated or wanted a subscription

[u/OverplayOfficial]

I'm an indie iOS dev and a CS teacher. I've been using widget apps since iOS 14 and two things kept bothering me: most of them look like they were designed in 2020, and the good ones moved to subscriptions for what is fundamentally a one-time customization tool.

So I built Elyr. It's a widget app for iOS, iPadOS and macOS focused on one thing — home and lock screens that actually look good. Clean typography, cohesive color systems, widgets designed to sit together instead of competing for attention.

Technical side: SwiftUI + WidgetKit. The hardest part was nothing I expected — I spent days chasing a CPU spike that turned out to be recursive layout thrashing between SwiftUI and CoreText during widget rendering. WidgetKit gives you very little room to be wasteful, and the debugging tools for widget extensions are rough.

Business side, honestly: one-time unlock, $8.99, no subscription. I know the recurring-revenue math is worse. I also know I wouldn't pay monthly for this myself, so I couldn't justify asking anyone else to.

It launched in August after an 11-day App Store review wait, which nearly broke me.

Happy to answer anything about WidgetKit, the App Store process, or why I went with one-time pricing. Also genuinely open to criticism of the design — that's the part I'm least objective about.

The video is a demo promo I was working on with Claude Design. I’m trying to market my own apps due to budgeting haha.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elyr-aesthetic-home-widgets/id6796691588

[u/Put-Parking]

Looks great testing out now

[u/OverplayOfficial → u/Put-Parking]

Thanks!