Why we only make Mac apps
Every few weeks someone emails asking for an iPhone version of LumaSpace. We get it. But we don't have plans for iOS, and probably won't. This is the short version of why.
It's not about the market
iOS has way more users. We know. A business person would tell us we're leaving money on the table. Maybe.
But the Mac is where we spend our days. We know the platform. We know what a good Mac app feels like: where the menu bar items should go, how keyboard shortcuts should work, when to use a popover versus a sheet, what a window should do when you plug in a second display. LumaSpace is built on exactly that kind of knowledge — it gives each screen its own wallpaper and handles the awkward parts most apps skip, from hot-plugging a monitor to sleep and wake.
We don't know iOS that well. We could learn, but we'd be making a mediocre iPhone app instead of a good Mac app. That trade doesn't interest us.
The platform rewards knowing it deeply
A lot of what makes LumaSpace tolerable to run all day is Mac-specific plumbing. It only decodes video when the desktop is visible, pauses when a window covers it or the battery runs low, and hands the work to the Mac's hardware video decoder instead of the CPU — which is why it barely touches your battery.
None of that is portable. It's the result of caring about one platform's specifics: its power model, its window server, its decoder. Spread thin across two operating systems, those are the first details to get dropped.
The Mac needs more good apps
Open the Mac App Store and search for "wallpaper" or "file rename" or "system cleanup." You'll find apps that look like they were designed in 2014, apps that are Electron wrappers with 300MB installers, and apps that are clearly just iOS apps blown up to fill a Mac window.
We think there's room for native Mac apps that feel right. Apps that use SwiftUI but don't look like a default template. Apps that have proper keyboard support and respect the menu bar. That's the bar we're trying to clear, and it's why our other work stays on the Mac too. Smartly is our take on an honest cleanup tool, the kind that tells you the truth about what it found instead of inventing scary numbers. Focos is a focus ritual that lives in the macOS notch. Both are coming soon, and both exist because the Mac kept handing us problems worth solving.
Small is fine
We're not trying to be a big company. We make a few Mac apps, they pay the bills, and we get to work on stuff we care about. We're independent and bootstrapped, so the math is ours to set: no investors waiting on a growth curve, no reason to chase a platform we'd serve badly. If the Mac market is too small for venture-backed growth, that's great, because we're not venture-backed.
Being small also lets us hold a line on privacy. We don't track or profile anyone; crash reports are opt-in and that's the extent of it. That's easier to mean when you're answerable to users instead of a board.
We'll keep making Mac apps until the Mac stops being interesting. LumaSpace is native Swift and SwiftUI, runs on macOS 14 Sonoma and later, is tuned for Apple Silicon, and still runs on Intel Macs. Given where the platform is heading, the Mac staying interesting doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon.