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After a two-year absence from running a digital publication, namely Minimalissimo, I’m returning with a new project. Just when I thought I was out... Okay, no Pacino impressions. I definitely needed that break from curation and probably also from the constraints of minimalism for that matter. Over the past few years I’ve focused a lot on making digital tools and the odd experimental physical object. The latter still interests me hugely, and I’m casually working on a design for FFF, which I’ll cover in greater detail another time. Yet I became pretty disillusioned with the former: digital tooling in the age of AI. The sheer pace of development, replicas, slop, and hype just killed my enthusiasm for building. And I thought, “What do I actually enjoy doing?” The short and simple answer to that was “curation”. The longer and more complex answer is building a respectable publication that features journalistic deep dives, meaningful conversations, and tasteful curation. All presented and exhibited in a way that makes you appreciate the web experience over any social media feed or RSS reader. My new project is called MOUTHPRINT, which I’m building with my cofounder George Kroustallis, aka Minorstep. Together, our approach is to look closely at visual culture across art, fashion, and product design, tracing the people, processes, and choices behind the work. We’ll be publishing case files, which might sound a bit odd, but what the hell. These will examine individual projects through research and conversations with the people behind them. Ultimately, it’s about acknowledging and recording the many people who contributed to these projects and helped shape them. Alongside that, we’ll be publishing exhibitions that bring works together around a theme, making connections across disciplines and time. I’m under no illusions about how difficult it is to build a publication from the ground up. We’re totally up against it, but the web is a big place, we’re locked in, and we want to be heard. I’d now like to invite you to subscribe to our newsletter for the latest developments ahead of our official launch. We’d love to have you along for the ride. → mouthprint.com
Never did I imagine myself getting into running, especially as a middle-aged man. It always seemed a bit boring to me. Cycling is what I thought I‘d inevitably venture into, especially because I love watching that sport. But here I am, roped in by a couple of friends, fully embracing the running trend. Well, kind of. I have zero aspirations to run a marathon, or even a half for that matter. But I’m thoroughly enjoying doing short stints a couple of times a week, ranging from 5k to 8k, with a goal of consistently running 10k. Why? First and foremost for my health and cardio fitness, but also because I‘ve signed up for a 10k charity run in October that I’m determined to complete in under an hour. It was actually late last year that I first got a bit of the so-called runner’s high. I went on a 3-week remote work trip to the beautiful island of Lanzarote, which is filled with volcanic landscapes. Well, it turns out circling some of those under the sun makes for great trail runs, which I discovered over the course of that trip. And it was a lot of fun, if not a challenging way to introduce my body to running. Anyway, I’m returning to Lanzarote for another 3-week trip in November, and I intend to pick up where I left off, but hopefully in much better cardio condition. If you want to follow my progress, you can find me on Strava. Experimenting with a running photo aesthetic P.S. You’ll never catch me on a treadmill. It’s outdoors in the fresh air, invariably battling a Scottish headwind, or nothing. P.P.S. I still much prefer rock climbing to running as a form of exercise, so you’ll still find me bouldering on plastic or real rock a couple of times a week.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it feels like the end of an era. Or at least the end of the familiar formula that indie businesses relied on to build, launch, and grow over the past decade. Something has quietly changed. It’s probably been happening for a couple of years, to be fair. But recently it feels impossible to ignore. The reasons are pretty obvious. What’s less obvious is what comes next. And maybe every generation of builders feels like this. The tools available today have probably never been better, although I‘m also wading through plenty of sewer shit. We’re building software and shipping feature updates at an absurd pace, and at a much lower development cost, at least in the short term. Yet unless you’ve managed to build an audience, every product launch these days feels harder than it used to. Not because a product necessarily lacks quality or value in its own right, but because we’re drowning in software. You either have a million competitors, or your potential customers now have the tools to build a rough version themselves, whether they have technical skills or not. SaaS is far from dead, but the abundance is staggering. And the old assumptions around product roadmaps, paid advertising, and organic discovery no longer feel reliable. We can now build more refined products with fewer resources. But each improvement to a product seems to have less influence on whether anyone discovers or buys it. I’ve been feeling this most directly through 099 SPLY. We started by making digital assets and mockups for designers. More recently, we built a browser-based 3D editor that lets people create still and animated product mockups without specialist software. It‘s comfortably one of the most capable things we’ve made. But the editor has also been one of the hardest things to get people to care about. I knew it was a risk, though. Browser-based mockups are very niche, but it‘s an experiment I have zero regrets about. Maybe the positioning is wrong. Maybe we simply haven’t found the right audience. It‘s tough to know. But I also don’t think our experience is unusual. Plenty of small teams are now discovering that being able to build something is no longer much of an advantage in itself. Cutting through the noise has always mattered. It just feels much more pertinent now. For years, SEO offered some kind of safety net. You could publish a useful product, write about it, optimise content, and gradually find an audience through search. It was never easy and it tested your patience, but there was at least a recognisable path. But search today is dog shit. Results are crowded with ads, aggregators, AI summaries, and content written primarily to occupy space. An increasing number of searches end without anyone clicking through to an external site, and taken to their logical extreme, they point towards what some call “Google Zero”. There’s a label for everything, isn‘t there? Then we have social media, which tends to favour founders who are comfortable performing in public, have the time to publish constantly, or already have enough attention to generate more of it. The product can start to feel secondary to the content wrapped around it. Each release needs its own miniature marketing campaign, and even then the response can disappear within a day. But I also respect the grind and energy some founders put into making that work. Distribution has always required effort. So where does that leave indie hackers? Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t think the answer is to stop making software, and I certainly don’t think small digital businesses are finished. But relying on the same combination of product quality, SEO, launch platforms, and occasional social posts feels increasingly naive. Maybe the next phase is less about finding another universal playbook and more about building in ways that are harder to replicate or make interchangeable. Or maybe it‘s about building a stronger rapport between founder and customer. I’m trying to think more experimentally myself, with less attachment to any particular format. And more willingness to test strange ideas, abandon weak ones, and follow whatever appears to have genuine energy around it. None of that makes the current landscape less frustrating. But if your launches feel quieter, your growth has stalled, or a project that once looked promising is beginning to decline, I doubt you’re alone. It might not mean the work is bad. It likely means the conditions around it have changed. For the time being, I‘ll keep listening, learning, and adapting. Maybe I‘ll even start a YouTube channel or something. If any of this resonates, feel free to continue the discussion over email or DMs with me.
I've worked with Photoshop for an age. Back in 2022, I created a small business called 099, offering a focused collection of minimal PSD mockups and web tools for creatives. Although I still appreciate the demand for PSDs, especially among seasoned designers, I wanted to explore a different way of generating mockups: directly in the browser, without subscriptions, licences, or heavyweight software. Because I feel a newer generation of creatives expects tools to be fast, focused, and accessible. Focused browser-based tooling has been gaining momentum across the digital design industry, even if it still sits in a comparative niche. But that doesn’t make it any less worth leaning into. And that’s exactly what we’ve done with the new version of 099.supply. the new 099.supply site using the MacBook Pro 3D model We’ve built a 3D mockup editor around a simple pay-as-you-go model, with enough customisability to be useful and enough restraint to avoid becoming something it’s not. At the same time, we’ve kept our PSDs available. That’s the point of 099 now: two modes of making, side by side. PSDs for those who want control, familiarity, and layered files. Browser exports for those who want speed, simplicity, and a finished mockup in seconds. This all might feel like a stepping stone before everyone is exclusively using AI to build mockups and web components, but not everyone is comfortable with moving at the same pace. Nor should they be. For now, I want to see where this goes. So, I invite you to try the tool. You can export for free, or pay a small one-off fee for higher-quality output, including 5-second animated mockups. Are the editor features sufficient? What feels missing? Is the pricing fair? Please get in touch and share your feedback. the 099 editor in action, customising the cap model
It recently dawned on me that, as a digital designer, I had yet to make a macOS or iOS app. So I wanted to give the former a try while also experimenting with a coding agent to bring it to life. While it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the constant stream of AI tools and announcements, I think it’s enough to explore a couple properly and find your own way through the noise. Keeping up with the industry is one thing. Feeling pressured to try every new tool is another. Anyway, for this project, my agent of choice was Codex. It felt like the logical option given my existing subscription to ChatGPT. So I ran with it, and it didn't disappoint. I vibed, nay, context engineered my way to a beautiful little Mac app in just a week. Local Log is a minimal open-source journaling app that lets you record both text and video entries in one quiet, focused space, with everything stored locally on your Mac for privacy and simplicity. No accounts, no cloud dependency, no clutter — just a clean archive of your thoughts, searchable and always yours. With autosave, editable entry titles, keyboard shortcuts, and light and dark mode support, Local Log is designed to stay out of the way so you can get straight to logging. Local Log app icon in dark mode Why a journaling app? I’ve always loved the notion of blogging and thinking in public, but there’s always been a layer of restraint to it. I wanted to create a digital space where you can be unapologetically honest with yourself. A private space to recalibrate, reflect, and reset. Where each entry becomes a small record of your mind that you can revisit whenever you like. The design was inspired by the irreplaceable iA Writer and the open-source app Freewrite, which gave me the idea of adding vlogs. The typeface felt important to me, and I had no desire to offer multiple choices to the user. I made a decision and I stuck with it. And that font was Geist Mono by Vercel. And a shoutout to Manu for the clever app icon, which mirrors the UI itself. You can view the GitHub repo and download directly for free. Local Log app icon in light mode Default screen in light mode Entry example in dark mode Entry example with collapsed sidebar Select actions in the entry archive
More in life
Most of the money in the creative economy goes to corporations and intermediaries. It doesn’t need to work that way.
When you get a cold, the virus hijacks your cells and uses them to make copies of itself, destroying the cells in the process. The virus does not care about you. And yet, if you get a cold, your body doesn’t dissolve into a pile of virus-enriched goo as a result of all your cells disregarding survival to focus on virus manufacturing. Why? Well, you have an immune system. But also, if that did happen, other people would say, “Oh no, Alice has dissolved into a pile of virus-enriched goo; we should stay away lest we also become goo piles.” Better to just hijack some of your cells, so you can walk around and spread the virus to other people. Thus, the theory of optimal virulence says that a more laid-back cold virus will be more successful in the long run, which is why the cold viruses that thrive today are the non-goo-pile-converting kind. Anyway. Most people reading this have paid Apple $400-$1600 for a phone on which you can’t do anything without Apple’s permission and monitoring. That was a strange decision, but on Android phones you can run whatever you want. For example, I noticed a couple of months ago that all RSS apps were terrible, so I spent 15 long minutes having AI make me a non-terrible one. I copied the file to my phone, installed it, and entered RSS nirvana, no registration, no app store, no nothing. It seems ludicrous that I wouldn’t be able to do that. And yet, Google plans to change things. Soon, you won’t be able to run any app on an Android phone unless the person who made it bends the knee by paying a fee, giving Google their government ID, listing all apps they’ve ever made, etc. There will be an “escape hatch” for users to install other apps, but it involves secret menus and scary warnings and a 24-hour waiting period. Google says they’re doing this for security reasons, to prevent people from installing malware that does things like steal financial information. Three things that any credible analysis of this situation must acknowledge The security issue is real, and this change will help. Lots of people are in fact getting tricked into installing malware on their phones, and common sense says that this will accelerate with AI. Common sense also says that during that 24-hour waiting period, some of those people might wonder if it’s really normal for OfficialMicrosoftSupportProfessional021 to contact them on WhatsApp to send totally-safe-virus-scanner.apk. It would be convenient for lockdown opponents if the security issue was fake, but it isn’t. For 95% of people reading this, these restrictions would not be a big deal. You click a few buttons, wait 24 hours once, and then you have the same freedom you have now. That’s still far better than Apple phones where there is no process at all. Oddly, it’s also better than Apple computers, where installing programs from non-verified developers has all sorts of friction that can never be removed. Most people I know use Apple computers anyway and just tolerate the indignity. If Google cared about freedom or privacy, they could have achieved their security goals without as much harm to freedom or privacy. For example, instead instead of making themselves the sole arbiter, they could have allowed for multiple certifying entities, and could have allowed users to add others (perhaps after a 24-hour waiting period). Arguably, that would be more secure: That way, grandma could install my RSS app without leaving herself open to random malware. Or, Google could have used private on-device malware scanning, or lots of other things. Google didn’t do that because they don’t care about freedom and privacy and because they like money.1 I think that’s a fair summary. This change addresses a real issue, but it does so in a self-serving way that needlessly destroys freedom. Even so, it only destroys a bit of freedom. This change, by itself, isn’t really a huge deal. Reading between the lines, I think the real concern is what this might portend. Having made this change, maybe Google will gradually add further restrictions, slowly boiling the frog and moving ever-closer to an Apple-style dictatorship. But will they? Maybe! Still, this whole situation seems under-theorized. There are good reasons to think that a full lockdown would not be in Google’s interest. And if you care about digital freedom, you could argue that a full lockdown would be a good thing. Some other analogies Switching insurance sucks, so some insurers offer a low initial rate and then gradually raise it over time. But they don’t want to raise it too much. Maybe they can charge you $50 more per year than a competitor, because it’s not worth your time to switch to save $50. But if they tried to charge you $5000 more per year, you’d be gone. Or try this: Say it’s 1750 AD and you’re the King of France. You care nothing about your subjects and only want to extract the maximum possible loot for yourself, no offense Louis XV. How high should you set taxes? High, because you want loot. But not too high, because you don’t want your subjects to revolt and kill you. But still pretty high, because revolting is hard, and your subject know that even if they succeed, they might just end up with another ruler that’s just as rapacious as you. Or: Say you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly heat it up. What do you think actually happens? Back to phones Why are there no Linux phones? OK, technically there are Linux phones. There are various Linux phone operating systems (PureOS, postmarketOS, Mobian, Manjaro Mobile, Fedora Mobility, openSUSE Mobile) as well as sorta-Linux-sorta-Android operating systems (Ubtuntu touch, Droidian, FuriOS, Sailfish OS) and manufacturers who support them (Purism, Pine, Fairphone, Shift, FuriLabs, {J,V}olla). While I love and support these (♡), the general consensus is that they don’t currently offer an experience that’s remotely comparable to stock Android or iOS, especially for the price. (Even more technically, Android is itself a kind of Linux, but you know what I mean.) Obviously, the laws of physics do not forbid Linux phones from being just as good and cheap as an Android phone. They currently aren’t because: Making cheap phones requires huge economies of scale. Making a good operating system requires a huge amount of work. For a phone to be useful it needs good apps, which requires a huge amount of work. Linux phones don’t have those economies of scale because few people buy them. So, there isn’t enough money to pay people to perfect the operating systems, and most companies don’t bother making apps, and so few people buy those phones. Meanwhile, there are also various Android-except-de-Googled phone operating systems (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS), and the consensus is that these do come reasonably close to the experience of stock Android or iOS. Personally, I used Android for a long time while trying to disable as much of Google’s apps and telemetry as I could. A while ago, I got fed up with this and switched to Graphene, one of the most popular Android-except-de-Googled variants. I don’t enjoy tech support bullshit, so I expected some pain, but I was willing to tolerate it for freedom/privacy/whatever. In practice, I found that everything was easy and worked flawlessly and there was no pain at all. Using Graphene made me realize that I had forgotten what it feels like to be “respected” by technology. So, on a personal level, I recommend that you use Graphene. But this whole situation is full of weird tensions. For one thing, the Graphene project depends on Google for the base of their operating system, and only really survives because of Google’s tolerance. And, at the moment, the only way to use Graphene is to… buy a phone made by Google. And while I recommend you use Graphene, what I’d prefer you do is switch to a true Linux phone. That would mean that you pay a lot of money for a poor phone experience. But it would help grow the Linux phone ecosystem. If enough people did that, then Linux phones might become become good enough that selfish people like me would switch, further growing the Linux phone ecosystem, et cetera. That seems unlikely, because digital freedom weirdos face a collective action problem: Linux phones are bad and people are selfish, so we keep buying Android phones and Linux phones stay bad. There are two ways to solve that collective action problem. Either some entity could invest a ton of money to make Linux phones good, or some entity could do something to make Android worse. The status quo is good for Google You may already see the argument I’m making here. Currently Android is just open enough that weirdos like me can run a variant that gives us most of what we want. But doing that is annoying enough that 99.9% of people don’t. This gives Google almost all the benefits of full control, while also sucking up all the oxygen and preventing a real alternative from emerging. (Apple, incidentally, is laughing. They get to enjoy a full dictatorship while Google does all the hard work.) Suppose that in six months, Google decides to escalate the lockdown and completely removes the ability to run independent apps. What then? In the short-run, not much. Tech freedom weirdos would howl, normies wouldn’t notice, and the world would keep turning. But let’s look at some numbers. A rough estimate is that 3-5 million people currently use private de-Googled Android variants like Lineage or Graphene. That’s a crisp 0.1% of the global Android market. Meanwhile, it’s thought that 300-500 million people install Android apps outside the Google store. (That’s excluding China and things like the Samsung and Epic Games Stores.) The biggest reasons are (i) piracy, (ii) modified YouTube/Spotify/WhatsApp clients, (iii) region-locked games, (iv) forbidden gambling or crypto apps, (v) local sharing to save on mobile data, and (vi; least common) open-source app repositories like F-Droid. In an escalated lockdown, some of this might still be allowed, e.g. local sharing. And many people would simply accept the new restrictions. But I expect that a substantial number would suddenly become interested in de-Googled Android variants that don’t enforce the lockdown. That would be dangerous for Google: If a significant fraction of those 300-500 million people switched, there’s a risk of a vicious/virtuous cycle, where people tell their friends, manufacturers start to cater to those variants, and so on. If that happened, what would Google do? Might they clamp down on those Android variants, too? Again, maybe! Technically, Android is open-source, but if Google really wanted to kill Lineage or Graphene, there are about 200 different ways they could do that. So say they did. What would the people currently using those variants do? Again, many would simply submit. That’s good for Google. Others would decide that if they must have an overlord, they’d prefer Apple. That’s not good for Google, but probably not a huge problem given the numbers. But others would decide to look elsewhere, likely to true Linux phones. Currently, it’s estimated that less than 100 thousand people daily-drive true Linux phones, 30-50 times less than the number of people who use de-Googled Android variants. I’m too lazy and selfish to use a Linux phone now, but Google will take my RSS app from my cold dead hands, so in this scenario, I’d likely switch. If a fraction of people do that—or even get a second Linux phone—it would still represent a huge infusion of money and energy into the Linux phone ecosystem. If this pushed Linux phones from “bad” to “sort of OK”, that could kick off a growth cycle. Eventually, there would be a risk that Europe—eager to decouple from an unreliable US—might embrace them by mandating that government employees use them, or passing a law that popular apps must provide a web-app version that works on Linux phones, or whatever. Would that actually happen? I don’t know, but neither does Google. My point is that the downside risk of losing their phone duopoly seems vastly larger than the upside, so why risk it? The smart move is to crush alternative app stores and fight malicious apps while making the bare minimum concessions to keep the freedom and privacy people onside. That’s exactly what what Google appears to be doing. Of course, they might go for a full lockdown anyway. Corporations do dumb things all the time. But I really don’t see how it would be in their self-interest, and I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if they did. Dynomight: could google achieve the security aims of the android lockdown without so much harm to freedom or privacy Google Gemini 4: Yes. Security experts, privacy advocates, and open-source developers widely agree that Google’s primary security objectives—protecting users from malware, financial fraud, spyware, and social engineering—can be achieved through architectural containment, transparent auditing, and informed consent rather than centralized gatekeeping and surveillance. […] The reason Google chooses centralized lockdown over user-controlled security is largely economic and strategic, not technical: Ecosystem Lock-in: Tying security APIs (like Play Integrity) to Google Play Services makes it nearly impossible for competitors or open-source forks to build a viable alternative Android ecosystem that supports banking and media apps. Advertising Revenue: Features that dramatically improve both security and privacy—like a native network firewall, revocable internet permissions, or frictionless support for system-wide ad blockers—directly threaten Google’s primary revenue stream. Liability & Support Reduction: Treating all users as untrusted and removing root/power-user capabilities reduces the surface area of user error, even if it removes the user’s ownership of their own hardware. ↩
How my 2.5 year-old is training me to speak more confidently, or else.
