Case study · Hipo (client project) · 2014 – 2015

Consumer iOS, built from scratch — the Moment story

At product studio Hipo I built consumer iOS apps from scratch in Objective-C — blogTO, FoodTruckTO, introduce.social — and Moment, a private photo-sharing app for families, told here in depth.

Role
iOS Developer
Where
Istanbul, remote for Toronto
  • Objective-C
  • UIKit
  • REST APIs
  • Release engineering

The setting

Hipo is a Toronto product studio; I worked with them remotely from Istanbul for almost three years, building consumer iOS apps from the first commit: blogTO (Toronto’s city guide), FoodTruckTO, introduce.social, and Moment — each one Objective-C and UIKit, hand-rolled API layers, full release-cycle ownership, design reviews with the client in the room.

Moment is the one worth telling in depth.

The product

Moment was a private photo-sharing app for families — a quiet, intimate alternative to posting your kids on social networks. Small audience by design, high polish by necessity: the people receiving these photos were exactly the ones who’d notice when something felt off.

What I built

  • Features and flows end to end — built and refactored core screens through the beta cycle, working directly with the client on weekly calls as feedback came in.
  • Release engineering — implemented the command-line build pipeline, so every beta going out to testers was reproducible instead of a developer’s laptop artifact. In 2015, that wasn’t yet a given.
  • The consumer-app discipline — API integration against a moving backend, review-driven iteration, and the release cadence that keeps a beta program alive.

What happened

Moment reached beta quality and never got its public launch — the client canceled the project. That’s consumer software: the engineering shipped, the business didn’t. The craft from those years went on to IDAGIO, Volt, and everything since.