From a design post
to the App Store,
in a week.

A few days ago I shared a mobile design here. This week it's a real app you can download — Glean, a private document scanner for iPhone. Solo, that turnaround used to take months. Here's the honest version of how it happened — the wall I hit included — and the real role AI played.

The timeline

Design to download — wall included.

One person, no team, no backend. It wasn't a clean straight line — there was a rejection in the middle. What made the difference was how fast I could recover.

Day 1

Shared the design

Posted the concept for a calm, privacy-first scanner.

Days 2–6

Built it for real

React Native + Expo, native iOS scanning, on-device text recognition, searchable-PDF export, optional Google Drive. (An earlier in-browser scanner attempt had failed badly — going fully native was the right call.)

Day 7

Submitted to App Review

Listing, screenshots, privacy details, and a marketing site, all in place.

The wall

Rejected — Guideline 4.3(a)

Apple flagged the app icon as a duplicate. I'd shipped with a default template icon. Fair hit.

Same day

Fixed & resubmitted

Three unique, on-brand icon concepts designed and compared, a stubborn iOS build error cleared, a fresh build cut and back in review — within hours.

This week

Approved & live

Glean v1.0 is on the App Store.

The real part

Where AI actually moved the needle.

Not vague "productivity." Three specific moments from this build that would have stalled me solo — and didn't:

A day-long bug, gone in minutes. The iOS build refused to link against a private Apple framework — a fresh Xcode quirk. Instead of an afternoon lost to forum threads, the cause and a clean workaround surfaced fast, and the build went through.
A rejection turned into a same-day resubmit. When Apple bounced the icon, I had three original, on-brand options designed and compared, a sneaky icon-caching gotcha caught, and a new build submitted before the day was out — instead of losing a week.
One person, the whole launch surface. App code, the icon, the marketing site, store copy — even scripting the App Store Connect API to track review status without clicking through the dashboard.

What stayed mine: the privacy stance — everything on-device, no servers — the product decisions, and the design taste. AI didn't make those calls. It collapsed the time between making them and shipping them.

What Glean does

Scan receipts and documents into crisp, searchable PDFs.

Edit, then store straight to your Google Drive — or keep everything on your device.

Privacy by Design: on-device scanning and OCR — no servers ever see your documents.

Try Glean on your iPhone.

Download on theApp Store

From a design postto the App Store,in a week.