I rebuilt 43 photographic processes from 1839 to today as on-device filters — no backend, no accounts, nothing leaves your phone
I'm a solo iOS dev in Germany. For a while now I've been building an app I think of less as a "filter app" and more as a small museum of photographic history you scroll through like a film strip.
Each "era" is a distinct process rendered on-device with Core Image + Metal: wet-plate collodion from the 1850s, dyed-starch-grain autochrome from 1907, a spirit double-exposure from 1862, subminiature spy film, a two-color office-duplicator print, and so on — 43 of them, in chronological order from 1839 to now, each with a little museum placard explaining the era.
Two constraints I refused to bend on:
Fully on-device. No backend, no accounts, no analytics, nothing uploaded — ever. A camera app that literally cannot see your photos felt like the only honest way to build this. Bonus: zero server costs and zero data to leak.
Brand-free everything. No product names anywhere — it's "Subminiature Spy Film," not the brand; "2-bit Handheld," not the console. Every filter is named after the process or device class, like labels on a gallery wall. That turned out to be harder than the graphics work.
Honestly the hardest part wasn't the code — it was resisting scope creep. "Weniger ist mehr" became a hard filter: no in-app gallery, no cloud, no video that isn't motion-native. Every "wouldn't it be cool if" got killed unless it fit the museum framing.
