Photo Declutter started as an iOS app, built at 50 with no native mobile development background: just 25 years of web development and a lot of help from Claude and Claude Code.

The Android port was a natural next step. I started with a blank Android Studio project on a Wednesday morning. By Friday the core session loop was working on my Pixel 7... swipe to keep, swipe to release, review before deleting. A week later the app was feature-complete: full French localisation, daily reminders, stats, onboarding, share sheet, the Rediscovered album, and Google Play Billing.

The entire Android codebase is Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, architected as a faithful port of the iOS MVVM structure. Claude Code handled the heavy lifting: mapping PhotoKit to MediaStore, SwiftUI to Compose, Combine to StateFlow... while I tested, reviewed, and pushed back when something felt wrong.

It's now awaiting review in the Play Store. As I wrote on PeerPush: if you don't have an iPhone, check back soon for a calm daily ritual for your photos on your Samsung, Pixel, Nothing, Motorola...

There's a pattern worth examining in how we relate to our photo libraries. The average iPhone user has thousands of images. Many are blurry, duplicated, or simply obsolete yet the instinct is rarely to remove. It's to keep, defer, and accumulate. The cognitive cost of deciding feels higher than the cost of storage.

Photo Declutter was built as a direct response to that pattern. The core insight is simple: the problem isn't that people don't want to declutter. It's that the available tools make it feel like a project rather than a practice.

The app reframes the whole thing as a ritual. Short daily sessions at five minutes by default. You just swipe one photo at a time. Keep or release. Nothing is deleted until you've reviewed your choices and confirmed. There's even a 30-day recovery window in iOS's Recently Deleted album as a second safety net. The design is deliberately calm: a zen garden aesthetic, a monk mascot, no notifications demanding action, no aggressive upselling. There are lovely side effects too, like rediscovering old photos and sharing them, or double-tapping them to add them to a specific "rediscovered" album - to build up favourites in a different way.