Almost 2 years after I interviewed Alex, this section is back. I wanted to pick it up again, and there is nobody better to do it with than Lucas. I had been following Lucas for a while (on Twitter, not physically) while he was building Futureland. But it was his work on Amore that got us talking. We have many ideas in common, and we share many values about software development, but also about life.
We talked about computers, care, the App Store, and what happens when the thing you worked on for years doesn’t work out. I hope you enjoy as much I did.
First things first: can you introduce yourself?
Hallo, I am Lucas Fischer, a full-stack design engineer from Germany who loves computers. Popular projects I have worked on include Futureland, Monologue and Amore.
How has traveling changed you?
The thing I love most about traveling and visiting different cultures is seeing that in a way we are all the same. It’s beautiful. We share the same problems, grief, and worries but also feel the same joy and bliss. Experiencing that makes me feel more part of the earth than a single nation. I wish everybody would have the freedom to travel and live wherever they want. It would be good for us.
It probably changed me in ways that other people could describe better, but I noticed that it made me feel less sensitive and more open. I was a pretty picky eater, but now I enjoy everything. Exploring a new cuisine is one of my favorite things to do abroad.
Before Amore, how did you end up here at all? I’m curious about the path into development and specifically why the Mac. It’s a smaller, stranger platform to bet on than the web or iOS.
I have been in love with computers since before I could read. The family computer was mostly occupied by me, and I would spend hours exploring what I could do with it. I played plenty of video games and experimented with every other program that was available to me at the time. That was around the Windows XP and Windows 7 era.
When I started high school, I had a side job as a bartender, and the cool thing to buy at the time was an iPhone 4, which introduced me to the Apple world.
At that point I still wasn’t coding or anything. Not much later we had an excellent computer science teacher who taught us Pascal. While my friends absolutely hated computer science class, I got hooked on coding immediately. Before that moment I was thinking about a career as a chemist, but after compiling my first Pascal program I knew this is what I want to spend my time on.
A good friend of mine had a MacBook Pro, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I saved up all the money from bartending and got one myself right before college.
The coding part of college felt easy, and so I didn’t have to attend classes much, which gave me a lot of time to play around with my Mac and Raspberry Pi. That’s when I started to build my first little web apps.
During college I got lucky and found my first few freelance clients, which taught me a lot about web development.
I always adored native Mac software, but I found it challenging to work on it myself. I tried a couple of times to get into making apps with Objective-C but always gave up after a couple of hours. It felt too hard.
When I worked on Futureland, we decided we wanted to have an excellent experience on iOS, so I learned Swift and got to work. Since then, I have barely worked on anything apart from Apple platforms.
While there is a lot of excitement about iPhone apps and the App Store, I always found myself more excited about the Mac. I think it’s because I spend way more time on it compared to my phone. It’s a great platform that doesn’t get the love it deserves from Apple.
I just love the Mac. I hope I can make a little dent and help other developers to build great software for it.
I love your work. It’s always very detailed, and I like how seriously you take small details. Where does that come from? I’m interested in the unglamorous part too: what your process actually looks like when you’re designing something, and where you go when nothing is working.
Thank you <3. When using something, no matter if it’s software or a physical tool, it makes me incredibly happy when I notice that something was created with great care.
In software today, I see that less and less, unfortunately. Most of it feels cheap and careless. In the end I just want to create something that I use myself and that I can proudly share with friends and family. If I can’t stand behind my work, why even do it?
I rarely design something in ‘design software’. I believe design is how something works and feels. That’s difficult to figure out with a tool like Sketch or Figma.
What works best for me is a lot of prototyping. On the web, I made heavy use of HMR (Hot Module Replacement), and on the Swift side, I depend on SwiftUI Previews.
When nothing works, I ask my much more talented friends for advice and look through my ‘inspo’ folder, which contains hundreds of screenshots and screen recordings from apps and interactions I like.
Additionally, I find it useful to record my work and share it online. Right before I hit the publish button is usually the moment where the weaknesses of my work are most obvious.
Building on the App Store can be frustrating in ways that are hard to explain to people outside of it. What’s been the most difficult part for you, and what is Amore trying to do differently there?
It probably comes down to freedom. Having a single company decide what I can and can’t do on an iPhone is super limiting and frustrating. There are numerous apps that will never be built because they would have to go through Apple’s review process first. It’s not really possible to build personal software that’s only used by me and some friends and family.
It’s also limiting for larger projects I have worked on. Sometimes important updates don’t go out to users in time because Apple claims the app is against their guidelines when it’s not. There are thousands of stories like this.
The App Store is great for visibility, though, which seems to have changed for the worse recently too.
I am grateful that things are looking different on the Mac. Here we can use Developer ID for direct distribution, which means we don’t need to ask Apple for permission to publish an app and can skip the App Store altogether.
With Amore, I try to make sharing apps with others, no matter if privately or commercially, as easy as possible. There is no app review and no 30% Apple tax. Just everything you need to build apps for the Mac.
Entrepreneurship is wild. What was the worst moment, the one where you seriously considered stopping, and what got you through it?
There wasn’t a single worst moment for me. I think not finding commercial success for Futureland after working so hard for multiple years was the worst thing that happened to me. I am grateful that I went through this time with amazing co-founders that I still consider close friends.
It took me a while to get back on my feet afterward, but it taught me valuable lessons, and I am grateful for where it led me.
What do you value most in life? And is there something you’ve changed your mind about in the last year?
The freedom to spend my time however I want to. This hasn’t really changed much since I started freelancing in college. I find the position I am in extremely privileged and wouldn’t want to change with someone else.
What do you think we will do as humans when work is automated by AI? I’m curious whether it has already changed your own process, and whether there’s any part of your work you deliberately keep it out of.
I honestly have no clue, but looking at the history of capitalism, I am mostly pessimistic about AI. I hope we will spend more time with other humans and reconnect with nature, but seeing how the majority of people are using this new technology today, I am worried about the opposite.
My utopia would be to have more time to follow our curiosity and interests. I would love it if we all had more time for play and spending quality time with each other.
I don’t like foundational models. They are ethical and environmental nightmares. They have utility, which has clearly been proven, but there is so much more to talk about, which is grossly under-discussed.
In my work, I have found LLMs to be useful for research, prototyping, and code review. That’s where they can cause the least amount of damage and be actually helpful. I try to keep them out of the creative process as much as possible because they make me lazy and stifle my imagination.
Recommendations are great, so would you like to share some? You can pick whatever.
For software, I’m a big admirer of Reeder by Silvio Rizzi and Ivory by Tapbots, as well as Martin Lexow’s work in general.
When it comes to music, I find a lot of inspiration in the work of Kieran Hebden and Damon Albarn.
To unwind, I enjoy reading and watching films. “The Courage to Be Disliked” is a book I read years ago that still resonates with me. For movie enthusiasts, I highly recommend “Sore: A Wife from the Future”, which is, in my opinion, the best Indonesian film I’ve seen to date.