Tales from the app development team at Steamclock.

We have a confession to make: we’ve been so busy helping our clients build great mobile apps that we let our website fall behind.

As we wind down Steamclock’s 15th year, we have a lot to reflect on. Over the years we’ve worked with our clients to ship apps that have mapped the internet and helped save over 35 million pounds of waste from going to landfills. We’ve supported five of our clients’ apps through acquisitions, and we’ve even partnered with Reddit to train an army of clandestine Cold War operatives.

Three years ago, we (and our sibling company, Royal Pixel Service) put Two Spies — our spy-vs-spy strategy game for iOS — into maintenance mode. By that point, the game had already seen an incredible run: a 4.7-star rating and over one million downloads.

Google rolled out a flurry of AI demos, developer announcements, and… AI demos at Google I/O 2025. But looking past Google’s LLMapalooza you’ll find a grab bag of under the radar deprecations in Android 16 (released June 10th) that are bound to cause headaches as users start upgrading.

When Android developers need to display a web page in their apps, most folks tend to opt for WebViews. But I recently came across a situation in a hybrid mobile app that required Chrome Custom Tabs (CCTs) instead, specifically for Android login flows.

In 2007, I was lost. Not existentially, just geographically. I was somewhere in northern Italy, wandering through narrow and unmarked roads. This was still roughly the pre-smartphone era, and my “learn Italian by singing” CDs proved less useful for communicating than for embarrassing myself.

There are countless reasons to shy away from adventure. That Kraken over there can’t wait to tear our ship apart. “Adventure” sounds like it’ll interfere with second breakfast, no? And won’t this journey cause our team’s productivity to dip?

It’s easy to start a company, relatively speaking. What’s much harder is to build it into something that lasts.

Since its introduction at WWDC in 2019, SwiftUI has powered an exciting step forward in building native UIs.

Large Language Models (LLMs), like GPT-4, are great generalists.