Image: reddit.com · I rebuilt my 2010 flashlight app in Swift after 13 years away — solo, with AI
A 2010 flashlight app rebuilt in Swift after 13 years
A koala-themed flashlight app with 300k downloads, written in Objective-C in 2010, was rebuilt from scratch in SwiftUI with Claude's help.
Credits
Earliest dated source:
The full story
In 2010 the maker turned a cast of characters, led by a green koala called Kiwi, into a flashlight app. It reached about 300,000 downloads, mostly in China, before Apple added its own flashlight in 2013. The app was Objective-C and the maker never learned Swift, so it went into hibernation.
They used Claude to learn Swift and SwiftUI from zero and rebuilt it from scratch as a character utility app with a flashlight, timers, a meditation mode, Live Activities, widgets and a small Haiku-powered assistant with guardrails for younger users. Characters were redrawn in Figma and animated in SwiftUI. They say the move should have taken a year but took a few weeks. It is in TestFlight beta.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: I rebuilt my 2010 flashlight app in Swift after 13 years away — solo, with AIReddit poster: ArtofNorPosted
The maker's post on r/SideProject.
If it disappears: archived copy of Reddit: I rebuilt my 2010 flashlight app in Swift after 13 years away — solo, with AI (opens in a new tab)
- The project: testflight.apple.com
The TestFlight beta.