Android first, iPhone when the Mac arrives

The most common question in the support inbox isn’t about features. It’s “when’s the iPhone version?”

Fair question, and the honest answer involves admitting something slightly ridiculous about how apps get made. You can build an entire iPhone app on a Windows PC. Every screen, every feature, every test. What you cannot do on a Windows PC is press the final button, because compiling for iOS legally and technically requires a Mac running Xcode. Apple’s rules. No Mac, no build, no exceptions.

TreatMyPet2 and Treat the Babs are written with Capacitor, which means the code is genuinely cross-platform. The iOS projects sit in both repos right now, fully wired up. The App Store paperwork is drafted. The submission checklists exist. Everything is ready except the physical computer, which costs about as much as a decent used car engine and does one job in this studio.

So the plan is the boring, solvent one: ship Android properly first, and let it justify the Mac.

Going Android-first wasn’t only about hardware, to be fair. Android lets a small developer test with real users quickly, sideload builds onto the clinic’s tablet, and iterate without waiting on review cycles. When you’re one person, that loop speed is worth a lot. It’s also where the reminder-reliability dragons live (battery savers, Doze mode, manufacturer quirks), and I’d rather fight those dragons early, while the app is small, than discover them after an iOS launch made everything look easy.

What I refuse to do is the vapourware move: putting “iOS coming soon” on a page for two years while quietly hoping nobody counts the months. The words on the site say Android first, iPhone to follow, and they mean exactly that sequence. When the Mac lands on this desk, the iOS builds follow it by weeks, not quarters, because the hard part is already done.

If you’re an iPhone household with an opinion about this, email me. Genuinely. Knowing how many people are waiting changes the maths on that used-car-engine purchase, and the inbox is where I do my market research, one honest reply at a time.