Follow-up: 3 months ago I posted here as the self-taught airline pilot who built a Mac file manager. Here's what your feedback turned it into.
Three months ago I posted here about Clarity, the Mac file manager I built as a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. The response was one of the best things that has happened to me as a maker, and the feedback in that thread has been worth its weight in gold. I have spent the months since building on it. I thought shipping was the finish line. It was not. The most useful stuff came after, from people here telling me what they actually needed. The biggest ask, and something I wanted myself, was getting it onto the phone. So the iPhone and iPad companion now covers the three things people wanted most, all under the same one-time purchase: the same encrypted vault unlocked with Face ID, metadata stripping straight from the phone (with a share extension so you can clean a file from inside any app), and your tagged people synced across from the Mac with far more detail than Apple Contacts holds. The part I am quietly proudest of is not a feature though. Idle Dashboard CPU went from around 60 percent to under 2 percent, and GPU usage on the heavier views dropped by up to 95 percent. It went from a laptop-fan app to something that sits quietly in the background. And some of you stress-tested the person search hard enough to surface bugs I had missed, which I fixed this week. That is exactly why posting here mattered. Three months in, I still love working on it. Thank you to everyone who commented last time. You shaped this more than you know. Since the rules ask for it, quickly: Problem. Your photos, files and documents pile up across your Mac and phone, full of hidden metadata (GPS, names, camera data) and duplicates, with no private place to keep the sensitive ones. Most tools solve one slice and send your data to the cloud to do it. Comparison. Cleaner apps find duplicates but do not strip metadata or give you a vault. Vault apps hide files but do not organize or find anything. Photo managers need the cloud. Clarity does the whole thing in one app, 100% on-device, nothing ever leaves your machine. Pricing. Free to download and scan your whole library. One-time $39.99 unlocks everything. No subscription, no tiers, no in-app purchases. Covers both Mac and iPhone/iPad. Edit: since it came up, here are direct links. Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6757109510. My original post from 3 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1sgozrr/im_a_swedish_airline_pilot_who_taught_himself/
Collected discussion
Direct App Store link for anyone who wants to try it: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6757109510 It is free to download and you can scan your whole library before deciding anything. Happy to answer any questions here, and genuinely grateful for this community.
Ultimate Clarity — by Matthias Stralman Ratings: 2 (across 1 storefront) · 2 reviews Average: 5.00 ★ Age: released ~4 months ago · rated 4+ Overall score: 80.1 / 100
For those who missed your first post (or barely remember it, like myself), it might help if you provide a link to your original post or - mabe even better - to the corresponding (Mac) App you are talking about. I did a quick research, but there seem to be a lot of apps out there, which are named "Clarity" or similar... Edit: I think I found it ("Ultimate Clarity"). Question: is there any kind of AI involved or required to make it work?
Good point, and fair. "Clarity" is a crowded name, that is on me. Two links: The app on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6757109510 My original post from 3 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1sgovht/im_a_swedish_airline_pilot_who_taught_himself/ And you are right that there are a few apps with similar names. Mine is the one built around on-device face recognition, an encrypted vault, and GDPR exports, all offline. Thanks for the nudge, I will make the links easier to find.
Ultimate Clarity — by Matthias Stralman Ratings: 2 (across 1 storefront) · 2 reviews Average: 5.00 ★ Age: released ~4 months ago · rated 4+ Overall score: 80.1 / 100
Hi! Mod here, just to let you know that the post your comment linked to was never publicly available, as it had been removed by our automation system when uploaded. I've just approved the post so other users can see it now, but wanted to let you know that it wasn't publicly available before.
Here is evidence that launching as quick as possible is good advice. User feedback is key. Good luck!
Thank you, that means a lot. Shipping early and actually listening turned out to be the whole thing. Appreciate the good wishes.
I've recently discovered that as a dev you're never *quite* finished with an app :)
it feels less like a finished product and more like something I keep raising. You don't really "finish" that either, you just keep showing up for it.
love follow up posts where the dev actually listend to feedback. i do feel like the price is a bit high given what it actually does, but at the same time, it can help you with expensive icloud or google drive fees but reducing space. good work
Appreciate that, genuinely. And you're right to bring up the price vs. value question directly, that's a fair thing to poke at. Here's the honest math I'd put against it: it's not really "photo organizer for $39.99," it's replacing what would otherwise be 4-6 separate subscriptions. Right now, all in one purchase, 100% on-device: Find & organize Face recognition across 100,000+ photos, fully offline Duplicate detection using actual visual similarity (pHash + dHash + aHash), not just file hashes — per-file keep/delete inside groups, handles RAW+JPEG pairs and Live Photos Person Deep Search — finds every file connected to someone across your whole library, multiple matching methods at once Advanced Search — 6 search types including full-text OCR search and personal ID matching A full rules engine for auto-sorting files (22 conditions, 11 actions, conflict detection between your own rules) Camera-based sorting, blur/quality detection, batch rename with 26 smart tags and 15 operations Protect Encrypted vault (AES-256-GCM) for any file type, 70+ formats, Face ID/Touch ID locked Metadata/GPS stripping before you share anything — covers photos, video, PDFs, and Office docs, not just images like most tools Auto-Redact PII across 21 countries' ID formats Sensitive content detection Compliance (the part most people never see) GDPR/DSAR export — hand over a legally-formatted data package on someone in minutes, with tamper-evident verification codes Retention policies across 21 jurisdictions Employment offboarding export with audit trail iPhone/iPad, same purchase Same encrypted vault, Face ID unlock Metadata stripping from a share extension inside any app Your tagged people synced over On the storage angle specifically: since duplicates and vault content stay local instead of syncing to iCloud/Google Drive, a few people have told me it knocked their storage tier down a notch, which pays for itself over a year or two if you were on the 2TB plan. And it's genuinely one-time, not a subscription dressed up as one — the $39.99 is the whole cost, forever, both platforms. Free to download and scan your whole library first, no pressure, so you can see exactly what it finds before paying anything: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6757109510 Full breakdown if you want to dig into any of it: https://ultimateclarity.app Would love to hear what you think if you try it.
Reading the title, it seems like you're a self-taught pilot, not a self taught developer haha Btw great work, love to see people listening to feedback and working on improving!
Ha, fair catch. Self-taught at both technically, just one of them pays the bills. Appreciate it!
Congrats on shipping and sticking to it, as a solo dev new to this space any tips on discovery and marketing?
Honestly, the biggest one has just been this: post here, actually read the comments, and fix what people point out instead of getting defensive. This follow-up post exists because of the feedback on the first one. A few other things that helped: lead with the problem, not a feature list. Let people try before they pay, no limits until they decide to unlock. Use specific numbers, "idle CPU went from 60% to under 2%" lands better than "faster." And show up again, one post and disappearing wastes the trust you just built. Still figuring it out myself. Good luck with yours, happy to take a look if you post it.
Thanks for getting back and sharing. I tried a similar strategy but my biggest problem is close to zero traction from posts. Not sure if the apps are just not appealing or I need to find more specific communities or other venues for outreach. Posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1uzq9cy/umbraa_dimming_and_sleep_timer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcode/comments/1rq9c87/i_built_resors_a_xcode_asset_library_app_for_macos/
The CPU improvement is probably the most convincing part of this update. New features are nice, but taking idle usage from around 60% to under 2% shows you went back and fixed the part users actually live with every day. What was causing most of it, view updates or background file monitoring?
It was a timer. The Dashboard had a Timer.publish firing every 0.5 seconds to keep some counters live, and every tick invalidated the whole view tree, so SwiftUI was redrawing the entire dashboard twice a second even when nothing had changed. That one timer did most of the damage. The fix was to stop polling on a clock and only update when the data actually changes. The GPU side was the same refreshes re-rasterizing shadow and blur effects every tick, solved by wrapping them in drawingGroup so they render once instead of every frame.
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That genuinely means a lot.Thank you! I use it every single day myself, which is probably why I keep going back to fix the boring stuff instead of chasing numbers. If I live in it, it has to actually work. And there is more under the surface than I have really talked about. A whole set of features aimed at the business and compliance side that I have not shown off or marketed yet. That is partly the next thing to figure out, how to surface it without turning the app into a spec sheet. Appreciate you taking the time to say this, it keeps me motivated.
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You have years of photos scattered across Mac, phone and old drives. Clarity finds duplicates and groups them by the people in them with on-device face recognition, so you can actually find every file someone is in. You are about to share a photo or PDF and do not want it carrying your home GPS, name or camera data. Clarity strips that out first, on Mac or from the phone. You have sensitive files you want off the camera roll but not in someone's cloud. The encrypted vault keeps them on your device, Face ID locked. And if you ever need to hand over your data (GDPR request, leaving a job), it exports everything about a person in minutes. One app doing what usually takes three or four, all on-device, nothing leaves your machine. It is free to download and scan, so honestly the best way to see if it fits is to try it on your own library. Would genuinely love to hear what you think if you do.