About me
Some words on how I got into mobile development, what I work on day to day, and why I still build apps on the side.
Hi, I’m André Santana, and I build mobile apps for a living, and then I go home and build more of them.
I got into this because I liked making things people could actually touch and use. Not the abstract kind of code that hums quietly on a server somewhere, but something you install on your phone, open, and let make some part of your day a little easier. That pull, of an idea becoming a working app in someone’s hand, is still what keeps me at this after all these years.
I started with Objective-C. Swift came later, taught to myself in the hours after work, back when the language was still finding its footing and half the tutorials online were already outdated by the time I read them.
Most of my professional experience sits in a narrower, stranger corner of mobile development: SDKs for biometric identity verification. Liveness detection, facial recognition, document capture backed by ML models, the kind of software that has to work reliably across thousands of different devices with no UI team around to smooth over the edges.
These days, at my full-time job, I build those SDKs using Kotlin Multiplatform. Not because it’s trendy, but because it solves a real problem: sharing business logic between Android and iOS means fewer bugs that only show up on one platform, faster iteration, and I still ship fully native UI on both sides. KMM doesn’t replace the native layer, it just means I stop writing the same validation logic twice and hoping I got it right both times.
Outside of that job, I design and ship my own apps under the name @santana.developer. Small, focused, mostly solo projects, built in Swift, SwiftUI, and Flutter depending on what each one needs. I handle the whole thing myself, from the first sketch to the App Store listing, which is a different kind of work than SDK development. Closer to the bone, and a lot less forgiving of mistakes, since there’s no one else around to catch them.
I’m based in Setúbal, Portugal, and this blog is where I write about the apps I’m building, the decisions behind them, and the things that go wrong along the way.