Bringing my iOS app back from the dead with Claude Code Link to heading
Over 15 years ago, I published my first iOS application to the Apple Store. It was nothing special, a simple take on the 15 puzzle game. Users could play with either the standard tiled board or supply a picture for a custom board. At the time there were already a few other versions of this idea, so I wasn’t thinking I’d make any money off of this. Instead, it was just a fun learning exercise to design, implement, and publish a user-facing application from scratch. I called it Y-Tiles (taking the ‘Y’ from my last name to create a unique title).
It was a great experience and I learned a lot: Objective-C, the iOS stack, and optimizing UI code for a smooth gameplay experience. I even got some graphic design experience creating a few of the custom icons. I ended up publishing two more apps, but my career took me in other directions and I stepped away from iOS development.
One thing you learn quickly: just because your app is on the App Store doesn’t mean it will stay there. Apple regularly updates iOS, and with that comes new APIs and the deprecation of old ones. If your app relies on something deprecated, you’re on the hook to update it—or risk removal. I had to go through this process in 2016, and it wasn’t easy after a five-year gap away from iOS dev. When Apple made further changes a few years later, I didn’t have the time to update it again. So in 2019, much to my disappointment, Y-Tiles was pulled from the App Store.
Recently, with the incredible advancements in agentic coding, I saw an opportunity to revive the app. I wanted to try to update Y-Tiles to run on the latest iOS version (iOS 18) and get it back in the App Store. I’ve been using Claude Code for a few weeks now with pretty good results. So I checked out the repo which hadn’t been touched in almost 10 years, and let Claude Code do it’s magic. I’m not ready to hand over full control just yet, so I gave it permissions incrementally. Once it was allowed to compile and iterate on failures, it really made really quick progress. Within an hour, Y-Tiles was compiling and running on iOS 18, although it had some UI style issues I had to fix. These took about a day to work through. Also I had to update the preview and screenshots to account for the updated UI.
After just a few days of work, I was able to submit an updated Y-Tiles to the App Store and it was approved the next day. Note that this was just my first goal. Next, I wan’t to clean up the code base, convert it from Objective-C to Swift, and add tests. I also want to make some UI updates to make it look more contemporary.