Not Boring Software
Not Boring Software is a studio reimagining everyday apps like weather, timers, calculators, and cameras by blending product design with video game design. Each app takes something ordinary and makes it feel fun and alive – with playful 3D graphics, sound, and haptics that turn basic tools into experiences you actually want to use.
Get to know Not Boring Software
Who’s behind Not Boring?
Hey I'm Andy, the maker of Not Boring Software. I grew up in a small fishing village in Alaska wanting to be a filmmaker. Then I got into sound design and really loved the way it could be used as a storytelling tool – you can tell stories through products too. I started out as a graphic designer, but that desire to tell richer stories and build more immersive experiences eventually led me into software design… which over the years has gone by about twenty different titles. These days I just call myself a software designer, feels like the most honest way to describe it.
Next year will be twenty years I’ve been in this field. I’ve worked at agencies, inside big tech companies, and I’ve started and sold my own VC-funded startup. My first was a creative tools company called FiftyThree, right when the iPad came out. Back then it was being pitched as a consumption device – Steve Jobs sitting on a couch reading books and watching movies, but we saw it as an amazing tool for creativity and expression. We built Paper, a natural-feeling drawing app, and our own hardware stylus called Pencil (before Apple had theirs).
Now I’m at my happiest, running a super tiny studio with my long-time collaborator, Mark Dawson. There’s just two of us. We didn’t set out to start a company – it started as a question: can you design differentiated software? Like, in cars, furniture, clothing… design plays a huge role. In software, it’s still often treated as purely functional. We thought there was room for something more playful, more beautiful, more expressive. So we decided to try, and that’s how Not Boring Apps began.
What’s Not Boring Software and what’s so cool about it?
Not Boring is a collection of everyday apps – things you already use all the time, like a weather app, timer, calculator, habit tracker, music player, and now we’re working on a camera. Our internal roadmap is basically the iPhone 1 home screen. We’ve checked off weather, calculator, etc., and now we’re just slowly picking off the core, essential utilities that people need every day.
The goal isn’t to reinvent these tools into some bloated “everything app” or add a hundred new tabs just for the sake of it. It’s about doing the basics really well, in a way that feels beautiful, playful, and expressive. You open it, and it’s not just functional – it actually makes you want to use it.
It all started with a question: can you design differentiated software? In every other product category – cars, furniture, clothing – design plays a huge role in why you choose something. But in software, it’s still mostly treated as purely functional. We think that’s a mistake, especially when the future is going to be full of even more software, whether that’s on phones, in AR glasses, or embedded everywhere around us. If everything stays purely functional, that’s going to be a cold, sterile world. We want to make software that feels alive and has personality.
That’s why we take so much inspiration from video games. When we started five years ago, games were pretty much the only place you could find truly rich, experimental digital experiences. So we thought: what if we built our apps more like a game? We use real-time 3D scenes, dynamic lighting, sound, and haptics to give everything a tactile, immersive feel. Even a calculator can have a little magic to it.
When we launched, we honestly expected just a handful of designer friends to notice. But the apps struck a chord with way more people than we imagined, across all kinds of backgrounds. Turns out, aesthetics matter to a lot of folks. Enough that this little design experiment turned into a real business, but it still feels like two of us at a kitchen table, just making stuff we love.
Tool Stack of Not Boring Software
What’s under the hood of Not Boring Software? Which technologies were used and why did you chose them?
From the start, we knew we wanted to build our apps differently, more like a video game, so we looked at using actual game engines like Unity, Unreal, or Godot. They’re amazing for real-time 3D, sound, haptics - all the stuff we care about. But they also come with big frameworks and long load times. In a game, waiting ten seconds while you see the Unity logo is fine. When you just want to check the weather, that’s a dealbreaker.
Thankfully, Apple has its own 3D rendering engine called SceneKit. It’s a bit more primitive than Unity, but it has everything we need, and it plays nicely with the rest of Apple’s frameworks. That means we can blend a SceneKit 3D scene in the background with SwiftUI or UIKit elements on top, and I can jump in to tweak something in SwiftUI if needed. It all layers together seamlessly.
On the design side, I do a lot of 3D modeling in Blender. It’s free, super capable, and can handle everything from quick sketches to final assets. Sometimes I use it just to figure out how something should move or feel before building it in code. We’ve had “happy accidents” along the way too, like a texture failing to load and showing a bare wireframe. It looked so cool we turned it into its own app skin. That became part of a whole “Debug Series” of designs inspired by those 3D debug views you see in dev tools.
Because we’re building inside SceneKit, working on these apps really does feel like designing a game – we’re playing with materials, lighting, camera angles, shaders, and my partner Mark Dawson is a wizard on the technical side. He can code up a new Metal shader when we need one. We both cross over into each other’s domains a lot – I’ve been getting more into front-end work, and he brings just as many design ideas as I do.
We work small and fast. Figma is just for quick sketches when paper isn’t enough. The goal is to get things into Xcode as soon as possible so we can actually feel them in the product. You don’t really know if something works until you interact with it. That’s where the magic happens – adjusting a spring animation, changing the lighting, or finding that one little detail that makes it click.
Do you use any other tools to run the business?
We’re pretty minimal when it comes to tools. Being such a small studio means we don’t need all the heavy task-tracking and productivity stacks you see in bigger teams. Most of our planning happens in a simple message thread, and a lot of my ideas start out sketched on paper.
We try not to linger too long in “thinking tools.” The magic happens in the product itself, so the faster we’re working in code, the better. It’s a very stripped-back workflow – no sprawling Notion boards, no endless Jira tickets – just the essentials we actually use every day.
What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?
For my personal setup, I mostly stick to the defaults. I’ve tried tools like Superhuman for email or Arc for browsing, but for me, the learning curve isn’t worth it, especially since email and calendars aren’t a huge part of my day. If anything, I want to be in them less. So I use Apple Mail, Safari, and sometimes Chrome when I need it. TextEdit gets a surprising amount of use for quick notes, to-dos, and planning – I like that it’s bare-bones and distraction-free.
I gravitate toward the simplest tools that help me focus, not ones that add extra layers. There’s so much “productivity hacking” culture out there, but I’ve found chasing the latest tools often burns more time than it saves. You can get a lot done with just a text field and a messenger thread.
For focus, I listen to a lot of ambient music – Brian Eno, Steve Reich, things like that, and I use our own Focus Music app, Vibes. I also use our habit tracker whenever I want to build a new routine, like reading more. Honestly, I made it for myself because nothing else felt satisfying enough, and it worked.
Anything else you’d like to share?
We just launched our newest app – Not Boring Camera. It’s probably our most unique app yet, and it pushes some of our ideas even further, maybe to their ultimate extreme. It’s been in the works for about four years, on and off, and it’s easily the most fun we’ve had building something.
Most default camera apps are fine, but I’ve never really loved any of them – not the way I love holding a physical camera, with the feel of the controls and the experience of using it. So the question for us was: what if you actually loved your camera app? What if it felt good, and it felt like yours? That’s what we set out to build – a camera you can fall in love with.
Now, discover Not Boring Software for yourself
Huge thanks to Andy for sharing the story behind Not Borting Software and the details on the building blocks that make Not Boring apps so unique and truly fun. Now, do check them out for yourself!