10 years of Apple text editor solo dev

Mihhail Lapushkin, a web developer with no prior Apple experience, spent ten years building Paper, a native text editor for Mac and iOS, alone. He avoided Electron, stayed on Objective-C after 2015, and kept the app going for a decade on a fixed monthly release cadence.

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• Chose native development over Electron to get a lighter, faster app and finer control over text handling, even though it meant learning Xcode, AppKit, and Objective-C from zero.
• Picked Objective-C over Swift in 2015 after comparing compiled app sizes: an empty Swift project embedded a 5MB runtime, the Objective-C equivalent stayed under 100KB.
• Paper has no third-party dependencies. The Markdown parser, the .docx exporter, and every UI component are custom-built, which cost weeks of work but produced a codebase tailored exactly to the app’s needs.
• The product philosophy separates a clean “default path” from feature-rich “fringes” hidden under the Option key, aiming to keep the core app as minimal as it was on launch day.
• Paid features are cosmetic (colors, visual flourishes); functional features stay free. Pro features remain usable during an unlimited trial, with a nag popup tied to characters typed while using a Pro feature.
• Pricing moved from one-time payments ($5, tested up to $200) to subscriptions, which the author expected to fail for such a simple app and didn’t.
• In-app support chat, built after Microsoft discontinued HockeyApp, became the main source of the product roadmap, at one point driving 90% of new features.
• Releases follow a fixed monthly cadence: one flagship feature per release note, written as a short letter to the user, with bug fixes folded in unannounced.