Chatter
An attempt at a language app you practise by talking to. Stopped in September 2026, and worth writing down why.
Discontinued
Discontinued 2026-09-06. An earlier description of this project on this page was wrong, and correcting it is the reason this entry still exists. It claimed the speech recognition ran on the phone, which would have made conversations free to serve; in fact every part of it — listening, replying and speaking back — called a paid service. It also said both halves were passing their tests. Neither half runs at all: the server code is missing a file it needs in order to start, and the phone app is pinned to tool versions from early 2023 that no current release can build. There are no tests. Nothing was ever published, and nothing was ever paid for it.
The idea was a patient conversation partner: you speak, it answers in the language you are learning, and you get a translation when you need one. It never got there. The prototype dates from 2023 and was picked up in 2026 on the strength of a status note that turned out not to match the code.
The thing that was supposed to make it a business was cost. Apps like this pay a few cents every time someone speaks, so they have to put most of the product behind a paywall. Running that work on the phone instead would have made free users cost nothing. That was the whole case, and in 2026 it does not hold: the phone can listen and it can speak, but the part that actually holds a conversation still needs a server. So the free version would have cost real money on every sentence, which is the trap the plan was meant to avoid.
The rest was straightforward arithmetic. Putting an app on Apple's store costs $99 a year, which is about two thirds of what this whole portfolio spends in a month — it would have raised the break-even bar rather than helped meet it. And the competition here is Duolingo, Babbel and a company that raised $78 million to build exactly this feature, several of whom give it away free. The full reasoning is in the post-mortem.
Where it stands
- Discontinued. It is not being worked on and will not be published.
- The server half cannot start: a required file was never committed.
- The phone half cannot be built with any release of the last three years, and one of the components it depends on was abandoned in 2022.
- No tests, despite an earlier claim on this page that there were.
- No payments, despite an earlier claim on this page that they were half-built.
Break-even: Never reached, and never will be. Nothing was ever spent on it, so stopping saves nothing — but continuing would have added $99 a year for an Apple developer account before it earned a franc.
Repository: coming soon.