What we would build for a software product and startup
Native products shipped end to end: the app, the server, the licensing and the launch.
We have shipped AirCast to Mac, Apple TV, iPhone and Android TV, Pasty as a notarised Mac app sold direct with trials and auto-updates, and Hillcraft Finance with iOS 27 Live Activities and a bank integration. For your product we do the same: native on every screen it belongs on, a server you own, payments and licensing that work, and a launch that looks like something.
Built and delivered remotely from Cheshire, UK · fixed price agreed up front
What goes wrong today
The prototype was never meant to ship
An agency built a demo in a cross-platform wrapper, and now it is the product. It cannot do Live Activities, feels wrong on tvOS, and nobody knows how to release it.
Licensing and trials are the hard part nobody planned
Selling direct means licence keys, trials, activations, refunds and updates that do not break installs. That is a product in itself, and we have shipped it.
Design and engineering from different rooms
The mockups are beautiful and the build does not match them, or the build works and looks like a form. One person doing both removes the gap.
A launch with no launch
Version 1.0 goes live and the announcement is a tweet. A launch page with motion, a campaign email and a story is what makes a product feel like one.
What we build for you, from the ground up
Native iPhone and iPad
Swift 6 and SwiftUI on iOS 27 with Liquid Glass navigation, widgets, Live Activities, App Intents, geofencing and on-device intelligence, the stack Hillcraft Finance runs on today.
Native Mac, Apple TV and Android TV
tvOS and macOS from one Swift codebase with a Kotlin and Compose for TV twin, the way AirCast ships: full-text catalogue, lease ledgers, a rulebook tested against thousands of fixtures.
Direct sales with trials and updates
A seven-day trial, licence activation, a licence API, signed and notarised builds and an auto-updater, the way Pasty is sold at v3.7. App Store and direct can run side by side.
A server you own
Node or SvelteKit with PostgreSQL or SQLite, WebAuthn and JWT sessions with rotation and revocation, verified webhooks, job queues with retries, shipped as hardened containers with nightly backups and restore drills.
Payments and subscriptions
Stripe licensing and subscriptions for UK and global customers, iyzico or PayTR for Türkiye, StoreKit where the App Store is the channel, all confirmed by webhook and settled in one transaction.
A design system from day one
Tokens, components, motion specs and themes so the app, the site and the emails look like one product. Motion prototyped in labs you can try before it ships.
Engines when the product needs one
Rust for real-time audio, rendering or hardware: a 22-crate engine drives Arcade Wow cabinets on a Raspberry Pi, with a custom FFT analyser and 23 visualiser modes.
The launch
A product page with motion, a campaign email that renders everywhere, App Store assets and a story, the way the AWOW Jukebox launched. A branded mini-game if the audience will play.
The Apple layer your guests actually notice
Live Activities and the Dynamic Island
Whatever your product tracks, a job, a timer, a delivery, a match, lives on the lock screen. Hillcraft Finance ships them on iOS 27 today.
Widgets, App Intents and Siri
Home Screen and lock screen widgets, shortcuts and on-device intelligence for summaries, wired to your product's real data.
App Clips
A slice of your product that opens from a QR or a link with no download, for trials, onboarding or a physical touchpoint.
Apple Wallet and Apple Pay
Passes for anything your product issues, and Apple Pay for anything it sells, through your own accounts.
tvOS and the Mac, properly
Focus-driven TV navigation, a native Mac app with menus and notarisation, not a web view in a frame. AirCast and Pasty are the shipped proof.
Payments in Türkiye, done properly
Built and running: the examples this comes from
Questions we get asked
We have an existing codebase. Do you start again?
Only where it is the right call. We review what exists on a video call, keep what is sound, and rebuild the parts that cannot become native or cannot ship safely.
Can one person really do design and engineering?
The shipped products on this page were designed and built by the same hands: the design systems, the motion labs, the Rust engines and the App Store releases. That is the offer.
How is it priced?
Fixed price agreed up front per milestone, scoped on a video call from your brief, so a founder can plan a runway around it. No equity, no revenue share unless you propose one.
Do you handle App Store review and release?
Yes: TestFlight, review notes, privacy manifests, notarisation for the Mac, and the release itself, under your developer account.
Who owns the code?
You do, in your repositories from the first commit, with no licence back to Hillcraft.
Send the brief, or the prototype.
A page of what the product does and who it is for is enough. We reply with a scope, milestones and the shipped work that shows we can, delivered remotely from Cheshire with a video call whenever you want one.