Surviving an Apple "Sherlock" and a 12-month cash burn

What do you do when you spend months building an AI-powered iOS keyboard to proofread text, and then Apple announces native proofreading in iOS 26? You panic, joke that Tim Cook is stealing your ideas, and then you adapt. I just published a 16-month retrospective on building my app, Smart Keys. It started as a basic WordPress site using ChatGPT prompts and evolved into a full iOS and MacOS tool for text transformation. The biggest technical and product takeaways: Platform native is hard: The iOS ecosystem is tough for acquisition, but building the MacOS version actually became my personal favorite (even if I have no idea how to market it). Retention over Acquisition: We burned cash for a year with a low ROAS. But because our Month 4 retention was >60%, the math eventually flipped in our favor. I wrote a detailed breakdown of the development journey, the failed marketing experiments, and how I finally reached profitability without taking VC money. You can read the full architecture and