PetOclock

Not every project has to change the world. Sometimes you just want to build something lighthearted, ship it, and use it as a chance to sharpen skills you haven't fully nailed yet. PetOclock is one of those — a clock app for Android and iOS with cute pet themes, born out of a deliberate effort to get more comfortable with Flutter and the whole app store publishing process.

The Real Goal

Honest answer: the app itself was a vehicle. I'd been building with Flutter for a bit but hadn't really stretched it across both iOS and Android with a proper end-to-end release cycle. I wanted to understand the whole thing — building, testing, preparing store assets, dealing with App Store review, Google Play listings, the lot. A simple, low-stakes app was the right project for that. No complex backend, no user accounts, just something fun that people might actually download.

It actually started life as a web-based tool before I moved it over to Flutter. That transition was a useful exercise in itself — rebuilding something you already understand forces you to engage properly with the new platform rather than just following a tutorial.

How It Went

Downloads were modest, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. A handful of people found it, a few left decent reviews, and it didn't go viral. That was fine. The point was never to build the next big app — it was to get through the full publishing process myself, at least once, without shortcuts. Mission accomplished.

What I didn't expect was how much time the store submission side would take. The actual code was straightforward. It's the screenshots, the metadata, the review cycles, the provisioning profiles and certificates — all the stuff that isn't writing code — that slows you down the first time around.

What I Took Away

Going all the way through the process — from idea to live on both stores — is genuinely worth doing if you're serious about mobile development. You can't learn the publishing side from reading about it. The friction is part of the education. PetOclock gave me that, and it's still out there if you want a clock that makes you smile a bit.