48
Mar - June 2025
What if you could only post once every 48 hours?
Background
A few summers ago, while interning at Substack, my friend (and eventual SF roommate) Tian and I joked that a large problem with social media was how quickly posts became irrelevant (Aaron Swartz’s excellent “I Hate the News” states this well). We talked about a potential app called “48” — all posts on 48 hour delay, only post once every 48 hours. We discussed further add-ons: notifications on 48 minute delay, one reaction (“the 48 react”), can only follow 48 people, etc.
I’d never built a mobile app before, and it seemed like a fun project; 48 is live on the App Stor and I’m still using it with a bunch of my friends. If you’re curious, I’m happy to send you an invite code! Below are some screenshots, I also demoed it at a local demo night (here’s my slides, here’s a recording).
It was also fun to build an actually light, and performant app from scratch. A pretty common development pattern these days is to build on top of (very bad) abstractions — many desktop apps you use are essentially a website bundled with Chrome, part of the reason why they run so poorly. 48 is pure Swift, and just 2.3 MB bundled!
Architecture
The app is pure Swift, with no external dependencies (!). I rolled my own auth because
[WIP]