Ernst Mulders

Ok let’s get this party started! I’ll be posting mostly here about my two apps AirAssist.app and Waterbomber.app! And perhaps some developer related thoughts in between! Always looking to get the conversation started on anything product and design related 🙌

METAR support View the METAR weather reports now directly from within the app. Especially useful to get a view on if HEMS aircraft are able to operate in current weather conditions or not 🚦 Update 2025.6 is currently being tested, and will come available by the end of the year!

Why are people always doing their best to insult you 😅

I do wonder how all these quick AI tools will long term influence indie makers. Yes you can create tools much quicker, but will customers loose trust when they also get abandoned by the maintainers much more quickly (to prompt a new project)?

The cargo bike with promo stickers: check Now let’s see that website traffic spike 😂

@ironbrands.bsky.social was leuke podcast! Goed (en bekend) verhaal! Moet en a) toch eens een keer bij de drinks gaan aansluiten en b) toch nog echt een keer simpel analytics gaan gebruiken 😅

What apps/sites are people using to track and share spotted planes? Should I build this?

Foggy days over north west Europe are not good for business 🌫️

@revenuecat.com is there an option, or can we get an option, to toggle the graph to not start with 0 but with the lowest value in the chart? This graph looses a lot of nuance imo.

First time I’m seeing Waterbomber outrank AirAssist in daily downloads. Winter is normally the low season for both apps, but with the LA fires that changed a bit.

Waterbomer trial starts. You can see when Twitter accounts tracking the LA fires started noticing the app 📈

🥹

What is the poorest bit of software Apple has written? And why is it the macOS emoji picker?

How is a side project from the side project called? And how should we prioritize those against the main side project 😅

User with a good resolution for the new year!

My userbase is mostly UK and NL, and the fact that it’s now really foggy here for days is visibly affecting downloads of @airassist.app! Never thought off!

Merry christmas everyone 🎄 And don’t forget to inform your family about your favorite indie apps 📱

0 days since I wondered why review was taking so long but turned out I forgot to click this button again 🤓

Testing different weather providers. The ones that let you easily test the data, actually have poor data quality 🥲 The other ones force me to do sales calls, which I try to prevent.

Showing a notification for Android users on the iPhone build of your app is not the cross platform code share we’ve hoped for 😅

What is the moment you decide to design a full component library for your side project? I do have components, but the design something’s feels not coherent between (similar) components 😅 doing a full detailed overhaul also feels a bit too low prio atm..

Busy morning over Franklin Fire #FranklinFire waterbomber.app

Sometimes AI has come a long way, and sometimes it just doesn’t

Thank me later Settings => Content and Media => Thread preferences => Show replies in a threaded view

Wow, atproto is really really cool 🤯

Created a Bootstrapped founder Starter Pack. People want to add interesting people fast. Hit add all if you want to follow interesting founders. Want in? DM go.bsky.app/E4f3eAx

Still liking the design of my very first published React Native app from ~7 years ago. The sun (or moon) shows how far in the daylight or night cycle you are.

I keep coming back to how genius @bsky.app’s handle verification through DNS is. Works top level all the way down, and ensures the user is who it claims to be. So simple and elegant!

Whenever my app detects two heli’s responding to the same incident, a “major incident” notification goes out to the users. This spikes traffic to the app so much the load time goes from <1s to ~10s. Need to look into better handling this spike 😅

I know that @airassist.app has sort of a seasonal MRR trend. But always when the low season hits I get nervous. Checking the year-to-date chart helps keep me sane 😅

Did Netflix turn off the Chaos Monkey before the event?

As far as I know I’m in two different starter packs, and the followers keep pouring in! My Twitter account didn’t grow this much in the past two years, let alone in 1 week 😅

I just realized I completely fumbled my ASO on Google play after renaming my app last year. Going to make some localized alternative store listings to try to fix this 😅

Live data is the most important thing I’ve got for my apps. I’ve built in multiple fallbacks, alerts and automated script restarts when the data stream starts to fail. However these notifications never fail to raise my heartbeat 😅

For @airassist.app I need to be present on more different platforms (Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads). Anyone has any good recommendations for tools to easily cross post in one go to the platforms above?

Sweet, now I can finally properly show off my domain name 😎