Why I Stopped Building Grid

Grid was one of the biggest projects I've worked on, and my first real attempt at building an iOS app. I spent months learning, experimenting, building, and figuring out what I actually wanted the project to be.

Eventually, I stopped building it.

Not becuase I thought Grid was a complete failure, but because I realized that continuing to work on it no longer made sense. Gris had already done something more valuable for me, it tought me how to take an idea I cared about and turn it into something real.

What Was Grid?

Grid was my first ever iOS app and one of my biggest projects. It was a 2D social hangout game where you could build worlds using emojis.

The idea was heavily inspired by Sonar, a social app whose history goes back to 2020. Sonar was acquired in 2022, and eventually shut down in 2024 after the original team left the company.

I loved the concept behide Sonar. It was simple, creative, and was apart of a small niche of apps at the time. After it shut down, I kept thinking about what my own version of the idea might look like.

That was Grid.

Why I Started It

Before Grid, I had always was intrested in iOS and mobile app development, but I had never seriously tried building an app of my own. Grid finally gave me a reason to change that. Around September of 2025, I started learning iOS development with the goal of turning the idea I've been thinking about for so long into something I could actually build.

At first, most of my time wasn't spent building Grid itself, It was spent figuring out how iOS development worked, learning to use tools that are used in large scale production enviorments, and researching tools to streamline the pipeline.

It took several months before Grid became something I would consider playable. Around February 2026, I finally had the first version where I could look at it and think, I built this.

That momment may sound simple for some but to me, Grid went from an idea to a real app running on my phone. Something not many 14 year olds can say.

What I Built

What started as a fairly simple idea quickly became much bigger than I expected.

At its core, grid needed to let people create a world, customize it, and then actualy share that space with other people. Building that meant there was alot more going on behide the scense than what you saw on screen.

Some of the larger systems were:

• The movement of each player and any change made to a drop needed to be synchronized across clients in real-time via WebSockets.
• All players and drops needed to be rendered simultaneously in a world without killing performance to the point my iPhone 14 becomes a hand warmer.
• Drops were not static. They could be placed, moved around the grid, and deleted, with the changes being updated in real-time for other users in the server.
• Grid had its own account/profile system as well as friends and invitations, making the multi-player aspect more than just connecting to a server.
• Also, real-time voice chat was implemented with LiveKit, thus introducing yet another networking challenge of synchronizing a voice chat apart from the server.
• Apart from developing the game itself, I also built the non-game aspects required to build a real app – moderation tools, subscription infrastructure, and other backend infrastructure.

The first playable iteration of Grid certainly wasn’t even close to all of that. In fact, most of the stack was developed through encountering problem after problem and finding solutions for each.

This is definitely the best thing I learned during the development of Grid. While it seemed like something really simple to do having people walk around an emoji-based server it actually led me to learn a whole bunch of new tools, and programming languages at once.

Why I Shut It Down

When Grid released it had a huge spike in players, however over time as expected that slowly dropped. The thing is with an app like Grid you need people to be on 24/7 or new people will never come back online after opening the app to no-one in a server. This was a big issue, and my solution was to see if people would volenteer to run Grid's social media accounts. However this plan quickly feel through as people started to loss intrest in the project.

With that in mind and server costs being as much as they we're it no longer made sense for me to keep grid running.

I loved building Grid and it hurt to shut it down but it was something that needed to be done for my future.

What I Learned

A lot was learnt in Grid with regards to iOS development, but I believe the most important things were not necessarily technical knowledge related to frameworks or coding languages. I learned just how different it was to develop a product rather than a prototype. A prototype must simply prove the concept. In a real product, there will be users, edge cases, bugs, infrastructure problems, design issues and code written at three in the morning by someone not thinking of the long term consequences and needing maintenance.

I also learned just how easy it was to confuse the process of adding features with making something better. In development, where progress means constant building, adding a new feature often feels like progress. Grid made me think more about the reasons for building something before dedicating a week of my time to implementation.

Ultimately, I learned that the shut down of a project does not necessarily mean its failure.

Grid accomplished everything that I set out to do with it. I was hoping to gain experience in iOS development and see if I could actually implement an idea in an application. I have accomplished that.

What's Next

I'm still building and working on stuff. Right now, I'm not too sure what my next big project is going to be. Whatever it is, though, I know what I learned from Grid will be put to good use.

Maybe I'll look into internships and see if I can get an early start somewhere. If not, I'll keep building.

I don't regret building Grid, and I don't regret killing it either.

It was my first iOS app, one of the largest projects I'd ever taken on, and something that taught me far more than I expected when I started.

Grid was never a forever project.

It didn't need to be.