Building Echo — The Devlog

Echo went from "I wonder if I could make an iOS app" to a four-platform audiobook study system in about eight weeks. This is the week-by-week story, reconstructed from the actual git history — 423 commits between April 19 and June 9, 2026, written by a mail carrier with no prior Swift experience, in the hours around a full-time delivery route.

It's all open source. You can audit every claim below: github.com/dfakkeldy/Echo.

Week 1 — April 19 · The two-hour app (10 commits)

It started with a problem, not a plan. No audiobook app on the internet would loop a single chapter, survive thirty interruptions a shift, and play at 1.25× without chipmunk-voicing the narrator. One Sunday of vibe-coding later: a working player that loaded a folder from iCloud, looped chapters, and played speed-corrected audio. By the end of the day it had background-persistence so it would still be ready to play after a long pause — the first brick of what became Smart Rewind.

Then the repo went quiet for ten days. (Day job. Also: using the thing every day on the route, finding out what was missing.)

Week 2 — April 27 – May 3 · The watch appears (20 commits)

The project got a name (BookLoop — it wouldn't survive), and got serious: a playlist editor with a virtual chapter queue, disabled-chapter skipping, persistent progress and per-book speed memory. Then the line that changed the app's shape: "feat: Add Apple Watch app with Connectivity, Haptics, and Glassmorphism UI." One day later the watch had widgets and App Intents; by week's end the complication showed the current book's thumbnail with live progress. The phone could finally stay plugged into the aux cable, in the user's pocket, all shift.

Week 3 — May 4 – 10 · Bookmarks learn to talk (48 commits)

The week of the signature features. Smart Rewind grew its three tiers — seconds, minutes, hours — so every interruption length got a proportional rewind. Voice memo bookmarks landed, including the detail that still surprises people: memos play back inline when the narration reaches them. Then bookmarks reached the watch, learned to loop between bookmarks, and got volume normalization.

Also this week: an Appearance menu with OpenDyslexic and Lexend fonts (the accessibility thread starts here, not as an afterthought), a sleep timer, the MIT relicense — and the first macOS app. Honesty corner: this is also the week of commits literally titled "broke some stuff", "broken", and "stuck on computing dependencies" ×2, as three Xcode targets were forcibly consolidated into one project. It got fixed. The git history keeps the scars.

Week 4 — May 11 – 17 · The study player thesis (92 commits)

The week Echo decided what it was. Whisper transcription arrived via a Mac generator and Python/Swift CLIs — audiobooks became text you could search and sync-scroll on the phone. Picture bookmarks landed, with the player artwork dynamically switching to your photo as playback passes it (the context-dependent-memory feature, before we knew to call it that). Siri-dictated bookmarks, Markdown export, and deep links rounded out capture.

Under the hood, the foundation work began in earnest: the AVPlayer backend was replaced with AVAudioEngine (volume boost, pitch-true speed), the 2,900-line PlayerModel "god class" started its decomposition into focused services, settings were centralized, fastlane + App Store metadata appeared, and the app got Dutch localization, in-app help files, and a full accessibility pass (labels, Dynamic Type). Five planning docs for an Anki-style SRS were committed — next week they'd become real.

Week 5 — May 18 – 24 · The big bang (132 commits)

The busiest week in the project's history, and it reads like a different app shipped every day:

Week 6 — May 25 – 31 · Stabilize, audit, rebrand (81 commits)

A maturity week. A systematic roadmap appeared and got executed: concurrency safety (@MainActor, Sendable), crash elimination, silent-failure remediation, database integrity, accessibility polish — then a comprehensive code audit that surfaced 55 findings, all resolved within days. The SRS gained review stats and daily notifications.

Two headliners: the EPUB Reader Feed shipped — the dedicated Read tab with card-based rendering, full-text search with highlighting, per-passage colors, TOC, and auto-scroll that follows the narration. And WhisperKit auto-alignment arrived: on-device speech recognition snapping chapter boundaries, detecting drift, and repairing it automatically. The "align an entire audiobook to its EPUB with one tap" dream became a feature.

And at week's end: "chore: Rebrand Orbit Audiobooks to Echo" — new name, alternate app icons, and the "For Every Mind" positioning, with the infinity-symbol icon in silver and gold as a nod to the AuDHD community the app was built from.

Week 7 — June 1 – 7 · Word-level precision + PDF (18 commits)

Fewer commits, bigger ones. TokenDTW replaced the earlier silence-mapping approach: word-level dynamic-time-warping alignment for drift repair, later optimized from ~125 MB peak memory to ~25 MB with a sliding two-row algorithm. The EPUB parser was unified across platforms and learned to preserve inline formatting (bold, italics, links, images) in the database. Tier 0 title matching made coarse alignment instant.

The reader grew up too: PDF companion documents shipped — page-level alignment, a manual-alignment sheet with a spring-loaded scrubber joystick, and page-screenshot bookmarks. The Now Playing screen was redesigned around full-bleed artwork, and accent colors started deriving from the cover art itself.

Week 8 — June 8 – 14 (in progress) · Polish with a safety net (22 commits so far)

Current work, straight from the log: a watch connectivity overhaul (durable application-context sync; stale transport commands can no longer replay and phantom-pause you), pause-on-headphone-disconnect, a Pomodoro timer on the watch with a persistent alarm, a fullscreen cover-art viewer, and a configurable date overlay.

The engineering flourish of the week: the accent contrast safety pipeline. Artwork-derived theme colors now pass WCAG/CIELAB legibility gates, with a three-stage rescue ladder (nudge the hue → re-pick a safe hue → fall back to brand tint) so no album cover can ever make the UI unreadable. Plus the unglamorous good stuff: a zip-slip path-traversal fix in EPUB extraction, and documentation refreshed across the board.

The shape of the thing

Eight working weeks. Four platforms (iOS, watchOS, macOS, widgets — plus CarPlay). A SQL database, an on-device ML alignment pipeline, a spaced-repetition system, and an EPUB/PDF reader — built nights-and-weekends around a mail route, by someone whose previous programming experience was "some Python scripts for GIS and a Visual Basic call logger in high school."

The point of publishing this log isn't bragging rights. It's the same as open-sourcing the code: you should be able to see exactly what you're trusting with your books and your attention — and maybe, if you've been wondering whether you could build your app, this page is the nudge.

The devlog updates roughly weekly, generated from the real commit history.

Echo | User Manual | Join the Beta | Source on GitHub