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James LobodaPapaYev Media

A builder’s story

One person, eleven products, two platforms.

I’m James Loboda. I’ve been publishing apps since 2016, on Google Play first and the App Store from 2021 — party games, quizzes and utilities that real people open on a Friday night. Eleven are live across both stores today, and I maintain all of them myself.

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Live right now

  • 2 stores
apps shipped
11
live store listings
17
native codebases per product
2
shipping since
2016

About me

Hi, I’m James.

Illustrated portrait of James Loboda
Illustrated portrait

The useful thing about shipping to real stores is that it is not gradeable on vibes. An app either passes review, serves ads correctly and keeps its rating, or it doesn’t.

Learning that the expensive way is why the ones I ship now stay up.

That pace isn’t discipline. It’s tooling.

I build agentic systems that carry the repetitive half of shipping: keeping two native codebases at parity, generating and checking store assets, catching the policy and ad-configuration mistakes that quietly cost money. ImageForge is that instinct pointed at images — thirteen models running locally, LoRA training on your own photos, an HTTP API and an MCP server so an agent can call it directly.

There is corporate, core-team experience behind it too: building a complete custom Android launcher — home screen, app drawer, widget hosting and drag-and-drop — that other studios built products with millions of installs on. On my own account I have published more than forty apps. That older catalog was reset when Play policy enforcement removed it, and I rebuilt from zero — the eleven live today are the rebuild.

My journey

A timeline of what I’ve been building.

From the first release on Google Play to eleven apps live on both stores — with a launcher platform and a full catalog reset along the way.

  1. 2016

    First apps on Google Play

    Party games, quizzes and utilities, published and maintained under my own name.

  2. Industry experience

    Core team, a complete custom Android launcher

    Home screen, app drawer, widget hosting, the widget picker, drag-and-drop for apps and widgets — everything a stock launcher does, built from scratch. Other studios used it as the base for their own products, customizing the −1 screen, pull-down and widgets with what we gave them. Plus AOSP and Android TV set-top boxes.

  3. Along the way

    More than forty apps — then a reset

    Play policy enforcement removed the older catalog. I rebuilt from zero, and learned the store guidelines the expensive way.

  4. 2021

    The App Store

    The same products, native on iOS — two codebases per app, kept at parity by tooling rather than by discipline alone.

  5. Today

    Eleven live, one person

    Seventeen store listings maintained alone, agent tooling doing the repetitive half, and ImageForge — 13 models running locally.

Skills & tool stack

Tools I use to ship.

  • Native apps

    Two platforms, each in its own language and UI toolkit.

    Android
    KotlinJetpack ComposeJava
    iOS
    SwiftSwiftUI
    Platform
    AOSPAndroid TV

  • Agent tooling

    How an agent does real work — and how you know it did.

    1. 1Harnessorchestrates
    2. 2MCPcalls tools
    3. 3Memoryretrieves
    4. 4Evalsmeasures

  • Ship & run

    Everything after the code: the backend, the money, the stores.

    Backend
    Firebase
    Revenue
    AdMob
    Stores
    App Store ConnectPlay Console

Guiding principles

What I hold to.

  • Shipping is the start, not the finishAn app earns its keep in the years after launch — store reviews, policy changes, new OS versions. Eleven are still maintained.
  • Look at the result, not the reportA green check can be a login wall; a rendered button can be disabled. Open the thing and see.
  • Automate the second timeAnything done twice becomes a script or an agent. That is where the pace comes from.
  • Write it downDecisions and the measurements behind them, so nobody — including me in six months — has to work them out again.

Problems I like to solve

Four things, and they compound.

The platform underneath, two native apps on top, the agents that keep them in step, and the release work that decides whether any of it earns.

  1. Android, below the app layer

    Core-team experience building a complete custom Android launcher — home screen, app drawer, widget hosting and picker, drag-and-drop for apps and widgets — that other studios built products with millions of installs on. Team work, not solo: one of the engineers on that core team.

    • Launcher
    • Widget hosting
    • App drawer
    • Drag and drop
    • AOSP
    • Android TV

  2. Native mobile, both platforms

    Kotlin and Jetpack Compose on Android; Swift and SwiftUI on iOS. Not a cross-platform wrapper — two native codebases, kept at feature parity by tooling rather than by discipline alone.

    • Kotlin
    • Jetpack Compose
    • Swift
    • SwiftUI
    • Java

  3. Agentic systems

    Agent harnesses, multi-agent orchestration, memory architecture and retrieval, tool and function-calling integration. Built to do the repetitive half of shipping: release checks, store assets, parity between codebases.

    • Orchestration
    • Agent harnesses
    • Memory & retrieval
    • MCP
    • Evals

  4. The whole release, not just the code

    Store listings, ad mediation, privacy declarations, policy compliance across two stores and one ad network. The unglamorous part that decides whether an app earns anything.

    • App Store Connect
    • Play Console
    • AdMob
    • Firebase

Let’s work together

Hiring, or want something built?

Open to roles and contract work in mobile and applied AI. The fastest way to reach me is email.

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Reply within one business day. No pitch deck, no sequence.