How to build a mobile app in 2025 | Starter Story

The episode opens with a surprising admission from the host: they were checking their Hilton Honors points balance and discovered they had "about a billion, which feels excessive. Even for me." This playful moment sets the stage for a conversation that is less about celebrity perks and more about the nuts-and-bolts reality of building a mobile app in 2025—starting with a single idea and a clear technical strategy.

The guest, a solo developer, describes how they conceived Habit Kids in the summer of 2022. The app is a habit tracker designed for children, built around a tile-based grid chart that visualizes progress with a clean, simple interface. The key decision from the start was to use Flutter, a cross-platform framework that allows deployment to both iOS and Android from a single codebase. This choice was deliberate: it saved time, reduced maintenance burden, and let the developer focus on what mattered most—the user experience.

The psychology of starting small