Ruka

Building Nice Weather, a small talk practice app where the other person doesn't help you. Solo dev on parental leave. Shipping daily for #Shipaton. Revenue: $0.

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

I'm building an app where the practice partner is deliberately unhelpful.

Every "practice your conversation skills" app I tried gives you someone who meets you halfway. Real people don't. They say "Yeah." and look back at their phone.

So mine says "Yeah." and looks back at its phone.

Two months, building it in public. What's the worst small talk moment you've had?

#BuildInPublic #Shipaton

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

@taishiyade Autoではなく、grok4.5 highを直接指定しても修正多い感じですかね？
私の使用感だと悪くない感じだったので、何が違うのかなと。

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

Spent an hour convinced the RevenueCat SDK wasn't linked into my build. nm -u showed 0 symbols.

Then I checked for one of my own symbols as a control. Also 0. So the broken thing was my measurement, not the build.

Two things were wrong at once. Xcode 26 puts the Debug code in a separate .dylib, so I was reading a 123 symbol stub. And nm -u only lists undefined symbols, so a statically linked SDK never appears there even when you point it at the right file. Fixing either one on its own still gives you 0.

Right binary, right flag: 72,332.

The control is the only reason I found either one. What's the cheapest control you keep in your own workflow?

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

@FitLinkcoach Better name than mine would have been.

You kept the XP and changed the label. That's my stuck point. Mine has no XP and no streak, so all that's left to pull someone back is the character going colder after a week away. Which is just punishment.

Did you ever run it without XP?

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

Thinking of using this as the app icon for Nice Weather, my small-talk practice app.

The two navy dots represent an awkward silence. The orange dot is the moment you finally break it and say something.

Does that meaning come through, or does it look like something else to you?
#shipaton
#BuildInPublic

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

Measured every English voice on my iPhone. All 41 are compact. enhanced = 0, premium = 0.

The best ones (Samantha, Daniel, Karen) are actually super-compact. Out of the box, nobody has a natural sounding English voice installed at all.

My app is voice first, and the whole premise is that the other person sounds like an ordinary human. Three options, all with a cost:

(a) ship the robotic voice
(b) send users into Settings to download a better one, during onboarding
(c) cloud TTS, which puts a daily cost on a free tier I promised would stay free

I'm leaning (a), partly because my character is supposed to be flat and unhelpful anyway. Am I talking myself into it?

#BuildInPublic #Shipaton

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

伸びてるアプリは大体UIが強いですよね！
ってことで、今日家族と図書館行った時にこの本借りてみました！
デザイン力皆無でAIに頼り切ってるので、多少は自分でも良し悪しを判断できたらいいなと😅
割と最近発売されたみたいでラッキー！
※図書館の名前だけ隠してますw
#shipaton

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

@IsekFrancesca Day one here too.

Before you lock the mechanics: I pulled 537 low ratings across 4 apps in my category and "feels like a game / childish" showed up in 9 to 14% of every one of them. Different category from yours, so it may not transfer.

Streak in, or leaving it out?

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

I thought the one thing nobody could copy in my app was that the character remembers you between sessions.

So I checked instead of assuming. 623 store descriptions, matched by script. 36 of them already say it. One is in my own category, and the biggest is a dating coach with 14,724 ratings.

All 36 point the same way. The AI remembers the user.

Mine points the other way. The character only opens up when you remember what they said last time. None of the 36 do that, so that is the part I am keeping.

It is a toggle now, on all eight characters, free, off by default.

Is a reversed direction a real difference, or am I just describing the same feature backwards?

#BuildInPublic #Shipaton

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

めちゃくちゃ楽しく英会話の練習できた！😆
適当に英語で話したことに対して、セッション後にフィードバックくれるのがめちゃくちゃ良い！
#Inko

[Taishi | AI英会話アプリ開発中🗣️ @taishiyade]

ガチで英語が話せるようになるアプリ『Inko』リリースしました🎉

楽しんで自分が欲しい最高のアプリに成長させていくぞぉ🦜

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

shipatonマジでワクワクするな〜😆
まだしっかりルール読めてないから、読んでまとめよう☝️
アプリの構想もある程度固まってきたぞ！

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

@Typingmusou いやいや大したこと回してないですよ！笑
ただ多く回すと一つ一つ脳の切り替えが大変なので、あまり効率よくない気がしてきています🤣

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

@five_mindset なるほどなるほど！
やはりそうですよね！😆ありがとうございます！
私も今海外向けTikTok動画を回すところなので、参考にさせていただきます🙇‍♂️

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

ClaudeCodeで10000回打つコマンド↓
「continue」

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

My TikTok account started at 0 likes and 2 following. I'm training the feed before I post anything, and today I found out I was doing it wrong.

The app is English only. I'm in Japan, and TikTok sets your region from the SIM and IP you signed up with. Their help page says you can only change it while you're physically in that country. So the region stays Japanese. What I can change is what I watch.

The Japanese videos are gone now. What replaced them is cats, cooking and dance. I had only been marking Japanese ones as not interested, so everything else stayed, and the feed settled on the most widely likeable thing it had.

So I moved what I receive. That is not evidence I can move where my own videos get sent.

Anyone posted English video from a non-English speaking country? Did the first ones land locally?

#BuildInPublic

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

@piotrzkowski Thanks! Already planning to build on RevenueCat. It's my first hackathon — any advice for a first-timer?

[Ruka @ichimirigo]

shipatonで使わせてもらえるツールって何なのかな🤔
ハッカソン参加するの初めてで楽しみ😆
育児的にど短期は厳しくて敬遠してきたんだよな。