Most "on this day" apps upload your photos to their servers and then sell you the upgrade. TimeHop did this well years ago, then went all in on social posts. Since then no one has really owned the simplest version of it: open the app, see what you were doing on this day, swipe, share if you feel like it. I tried eight of them, plus an Apple Shortcut, before building my own. The Shortcut fell short fast. It needed a separate reminder, sharing was awkward, and it never showed how far through you were.
I usually believe the future is software built for humans and agents together, the kind a command-line interface (CLI) or a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server can drive. A few things in this portfolio are the opposite bet: one-to-one software, built for one person's exact taste. Encore is opinionated on purpose. It opens to a vertical swipe with nothing else to learn, it has no ads, and it runs fully on-device, so your photos never leave your phone.
There's no real risk here, which is part of why it's fun. Nothing mission-critical, no fragile integrations to keep alive, just one clean path from Swift to TestFlight to my own iPhone and my own photos. I can change it the same day instead of filing a request on someone's roadmap and waiting. If other people find it useful, great. Mostly it's practice, and a record of how I think.