Kiveo — A quiet corner for readers

The Challenge

Reading apps got weird. Goodreads turned into a social network nobody asked for. Every alternative wanted to gamify your habits — streaks, leaderboards, badges for finishing a chapter. We wanted to sit down with a book, log a thought, and move on. Nothing on the App Store did that without noise. So we built it.

Our Approach

We went native SwiftUI from day one. No cross-platform framework, no shortcuts. One developer, seven months from concept to App Store. CloudKit handles sync without us ever touching user data. The backend runs NestJS on Railway behind Cloudflare, with PostgreSQL for persistence and Redis for caching and rate limiting. A custom book data crawling cron fills in editions and series metadata — that took several iterations to get right. When iOS 26 dropped mid-development, adapting the app required significant rework that's still ongoing. Every decision came back to the same question: does this respect the reader's time?

The Results