I rebuilt it before anyone came — a second app, and moving as a family

So far I've written about the inside of STIL.TOON — how it turns a face into a drawing. Today is about rebuilding a big part of that structure, right after release — while almost no one was using it yet.

Right after release, I removed the account

The first version I shipped had an ordinary sign-up. Make an account with your email, log in, use the app. The usual shape.

But right after launch, I removed the account system itself, wholesale. The reason is exactly the one I gave with the first app, STIL. Saying I won't hold your material while collecting your personal data at the front door doesn't line up. The safest data is the data you never had. I wrote that story in I decided not to hold your data.

A family moves together

Here's the part you only get with a second app. Removing accounts wasn't something TOON thought up on its own. It was TOON catching up, within a few days, to a decision the parent app STIL. had already made.

When you stand on privacy, leaving a sign-up in just one of the family's apps breaks the case. "We don't hold your data" only becomes true when every app says it. So one app decides, and the next follows. That's how the STIL family moves in the same direction.

After making sure it wouldn't break

Rebuilding means nothing if features break. Looking into it, all the account had been doing in TOON was two things: authentication, and counting AI usage.

• Billing is tied to your Apple ID by StoreKit 2. I don't need to hold any membership info.
• Sync across devices runs on CloudKit — inside your own iCloud.
• AI processing was on-device from the start. No server, and no identifier to tell users apart.

In other words, there was no reason for me to sit in the middle holding personal data. Removing the parts that held it didn't lose anyone's data. And since the counting mechanism went with it, the AI became free and unlimited for everyone.

A hole found in one, sealed in both

There was a moment in this rebuild I found genuinely interesting. Mid-rebuild, on a real device, I caught a bug in TOON where Pro access dropped for a split second right after purchase. Once I understood the cause and fixed it in TOON, I carried the very same fix back into the parent app, STIL.

A stumble found in one app becomes a lesson for the other. When you run two apps alone, in parallel, one's failure sometimes rescues the other. So this, I thought, is what moving as a family means.

Why it had to be now

There was a reason to rebuild early. Remove sign-up after real users arrive, and you create work: "please delete my account," "migrate my data." On top of that, take away the ability to make an account, and the account-deletion feature Apple requires isn't needed either.

The time you can rebuild most cleanly is now, before anyone's come. While it's still at its lightest, just after release, swap the insides out. That was a rhythm I'd learned on the first app.

Next time

Next, the "watermark" this rebuild pushed to the front. How a watermark is a limit and, at the same time, an advertisement.

STIL.TOON is out on the App Store.