Hiroi is live on the App Store — a translation × learning app, built solo in six months
This is a solo dev app launch post — the kind I've read a hundred of and never thought I'd write. On July 13, 2026, Hiroi (拾い) went live on the App Store.
It's a real-time translation × learning app for Japanese, English, and Chinese, built alone over six months. Today's post is less a pitch than a record of the road here — and one small ask.
What it is (the 30-second version)
Hiroi does one sentence's worth of things: every conversation becomes something you keep.
- Meetings and small talk become live captions as people speak (Japanese · English · Chinese)
- After the conversation, catch the words worth keeping with one tap
- Caught words go into an FSRS spaced-repetition deck — learn them right before you'd forget
- When a learned word resurfaces in real life, the app quietly tells you — meet it again
It never records audio; transcripts and your deck stay on your device. No subscription — the first hour is free, then prepaid time packs whose hours never expire.
The why behind all of it is in the earlier posts: the meeting you can't follow is where it started, and killing the feature I spent the most time on is where it turned.
The honest road
It wasn't a clean story.
App Review sent me homework — twice. Every point was fair, and fixing each one made the app a little more honest. The night a rejection lands, it stings; read again the next morning, it's usually a user advocate speaking.
The biggest thing six months of building alone taught me: subtraction beats addition. The most productive day of the project was the day I deleted my own best-crafted feature.
And one more thing. The app itself is made of caught things — a word I missed in a meeting, a tester's offhand comment, a reviewer's note. Things that would have drifted past, picked up and carried forward. The product and the process turned out to have the same shape.
A first ask
If you're willing, try it in a real meeting or conversation — not a clean demo clip. Real rooms, with crosstalk and noise.
Then tell me where it failed you. "One word slipped here," "this phrasing translated oddly" — that kind of specific, one-line report is the most valuable thing Hiroi can receive right now. The in-app wish form, hello@hiroi.app, or @hiroi_app on X. I read everything.
Download here: Hiroi on the App Store. Your first hour is free.
This is where it actually starts
A solo dev app launch feels less like a finish line and more like opening a small shop: the curtain goes up in the morning, the room is still quiet, and from here you make it a little better every day.
This journal continues — the build notes, and the craft of learning from real conversations. To everyone who helped along the way: thank you.
May the words you barely catch today become the words you carry into the next room.