The story behind my app

Livre is a minimal and beautifully designed booklist. It helps you keep track of your reading list and how far along you are in each of the books.

I designed it because I cannot keep track of bookmarks if my life depended on it. Everytime I used to go to a bookstore I used to pickup at least 3 extras just to keep on me. I hated finding my page constantly so I created a simple counter with the Shortcuts app on my phone. Eventually i found myself using that shortcut so much I decided to turn it into an app.

After a month, i had the first working version of Livre. It worked fine but it wasn’t good enough so I kept rebuilding parts of it so much so almost none of the original code is remaining. Its like that thought experiment, the ship of theseus (no, I didn’t learn about that from Wandavision). I removed all the rotting wood from the original ship piece by piece and replaced it with fresh planks; the ship looks the same but it now works better and none of the original rotting planks remain.

In my mind the app has already reached it’s first checkpoint and has reached a point where the app serves it’s most basic purpose. Now I am taking it a step further. In the latest beta, I added the notes and quotes feature which was highly requested as well as a lot of improvements to the UI, reliabilty and performance of the app. However, I intend to add widgets before the next public release as that has always been an obvious feature on the top of my list. There is also another feature that I have been working on but eventhough the feature’s groundwork has been in the app for a while, you just can’t see it yet.

An iPad and a Mac app with cloud sync is in the works but I think I can only release those after July 2021.

Thats the story of Livre and where I see it going. If you haven’t already you can download it here or join the beta here.