From Idea to App in a Week - Meet Chord Mage!

Just two weeks I back I got an idea to build an app. And with the tools and knowledge I have to my disposal… I just thought: Let’s build it.

How does building an app from scratch work in 2025, and which things did I run into?

Let me take you through all the step I took and the problems I faced along the way.

So. Meet Chord Mage.

The idea.

As I have been learning guitar for the past year I’ve been dipping my toes into getting to know music theory a better.

The advertisement gods have picked up on that and started to bombard me with ads for a chord progression helper tool.

I took a closer look at what the tool was offering, and thought: isn’t it way easier to understand if this was an app?

The layout of the tool is kind of confusing, and frankly quite expensive for what it is. So I had to make it.

What to use?

At first, I thought of creating a simple web based application for this, but since I already know how to do such a thing and always want to learn new stuff, I decided it was a great idea to launch a new app into the world.

This meant I’d have to deal with iOS and Android. I remember iOS development being a pretty seamless experience, Android on the other hand, made me worry a bit.

I decided I needed a platform which supports both iOS and Android, and was not very hard to use. Also… I didn’t have the time to learn a completely new programming language. So it had to be one I knew.

In the past I used React Native with Expo. But I wasn’t really fond of their upgrade strategy. I could do with a platform with a little more opinions and less freedom. I wasn’t going to build anything groundbreaking.

After a bit of research I stumbled upon the project NativeScript which allows you to write your app in not only JavaScript and TypeScript, but also supports an array of different frameworks.

Why NativeScript?

What really spoke to me was that they basically created a layer on top of existing native platforms. It would create a programming interface I could work with, while offering a native experience for the end user.

You might think: “But doesn’t React Native do this?”. In a way: yes. But in this case NativeScript offers a lot more.

Apart from a bunch of components to work with, it comes with a lot of tooling around development and deployment.

One of the things I least liked about React Native and Expo was the fact that upgrades could cause changes in how xcode and Android projects worked. It often times needed a lot of refactoring. NativeScript offers a sort of scaffolding way of managing project settings. Perfect.

Everything felt so streamlined compared to with what I was used to. Sure it has its quirks, but that could be overlooked for the actual pains it is solving.

From a complete fresh install I was up and running developing the app in an iOS simulator in just one hour. I didn’t even have xcode or any simulator installed!

Music theory and chord progressions

Ah, yes. Music theory. It’s fascinating. What makes notes sound good together, and why? It is something I really wish to understand better.

The thing with music theory is that it happens to work in a strange mathematical way. Which is actually perfect for us programming nerds.

The app I wanted to create would make creating chord progressions a bit easier. It’s based on the IV-V-I progression with some extra modes to work with.

I will spare you the details, as I am not really the right person to be explaining why the theory works. I just implemented what I saw.

Here is a short introduction to what the app does:

The biggest hurdles

It wasn’t so much the actual development, but the release process that takes up a lot of time. It’s good for me to run this whole process through again, but boy, is it cumbersome.

Getting the app on the App Store was not that difficult. I have to say the process is pretty clear and using NativeScript made it a bit easier. Most of my time was spent setting the app up and getting everything in order before it could be sent in for review.

I think the hardest part of the iOS development and release was figuring out TestFlight and App Store Connect, but honestly. Not bad.

Then came the next platform. Android. Which I own zero devices with of. So I had to find someone with an old device. As it happens my mom had an old Samsung S9 lying around. Nice!

But before I got the device I wanted to see if I could run it in an emulator. Which I remembered to be an awful experience. Luckily though, the Android development and emulation cycle has been greatly revamped since I last built an app. I was honestly surprised at how fast I had a working emulator with my app running in it.

As a bonus, the app didn’t even need that much work.

Download now

You can find Chord Mage on the App Store and Google Play.

For more information check out chordmage.com

What’s next

I wish to expand the functionality of the app pretty soon, as well as improve support for it.

Expect some more in-depth mobile development articles as well.

Cheers.