About

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Frank Thamel

Senior iOS Engineer
Not On The High Street · iOS Dev Library
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I'm a Senior iOS Engineer with over 10 years' experience building and shipping consumer apps in Swift and SwiftUI. I care about intuitive, inclusive mobile experiences, clean modular architecture, and using AI to build better apps faster without cutting corners on design, code quality or performance.

What I'm working on

As the sole iOS developer at Not On The High Street, I own the full app lifecycle for a marketplace serving over 5,000 small UK businesses. I led the app's complete modernisation: a move to 100% Swift, a modular SwiftUI architecture where every feature module ships with its own preview app, and the iOS 26 Liquid Glass design. All the while the app has kept a 4.9★ App Store rating (49K ratings) and a 100% crash-free user rate.

Highlights include:

  • The Curator, an in-app AI shopping assistant I took from prototype to production for the 2025 Christmas peak. It has streaming chat, savable shortlists, and stream reconnection that survives iOS suspending the app.
  • A design-system package with its own preview app, plus a custom Claude skill that encodes the whole system. With it, pixel-perfect views are generated from Figma via MCP in minutes and checked automatically by a token-validator agent.

I work in an agentic, AI-driven way every day, using Claude Code, custom skills and agents, and MCP tooling.

Projects & Books

  • LivaFast – a privacy-first liver health and fasting tracker for iPhone and Apple Watch. Every fast feeds a Liver Progress Score, and LiVA, an AI coach, runs fully on-device with Apple Foundation Models. It's built from 25 Swift packages with Swift 6 strict concurrency, HealthKit, CloudKit and Live Activities.
  • Talene Kids School – a learning app for young children built with Swift and SpriteKit, with over 20,000 downloads.
  • Bookmarks: Organize & Track – saves, organises and resurfaces web content, with read-later reminders, a Kanban board, tags and iCloud sync.
  • AI Character & Asset Studio – a learning project: a web app that bridges GPT image models and Nano Banana to create consistent characters for kids' printables. A built-in MCP server lets Claude Code run the whole workflow hands-free.
  • Crafting Consistency: Building a Complete App Design System with SwiftUI – goes from Figma to a scalable SwiftUI design system, covering tokens, components, snapshot testing and CI/CD. Featured in iOS Dev Weekly (Issue 673).
  • SwiftUI and Accessibility: Creating Inclusive iOS Applications – a free guide to Dynamic Type, contrast, VoiceOver and accessibility auditing, with nearly 400 downloads.

Before NOTHS, I led the iOS team at Sysco LABS, built the Cabonline taxi-booking app for the Nordics at Creative Software, and worked on imSMART, an enterprise sales app used by 60,000+ people, at Calcey Technologies. Since 2016 I've also run iOS Dev Library, where I share what I learn through the blog, the newsletter and eBooks.

In my free time, I enjoy playing guitar and singing with my wife and daughter. I love turning ideas into apps that inspire others. Above all, I believe in learning by doing and hope to motivate fellow developers to build amazing, people-focused iOS experiences.