DETOURthe shortest path, refused

July 17, 2026

I Did It the Hard Way on Purpose

I rebuilt ten apps the slowest, most tedious way possible — every button placed by hand, nothing reused. That sounds like a waste of time. It's the whole reason they look real instead of like a mockup.

  • #making things
  • #interfaces
  • #process

The rule I set for rebuilding ten apps by hand was a strange one: do it the slowest, most tedious way possible. No shortcuts. Nothing reused between apps. Every row, every button, every little badge placed by hand, one at a time. That’s the opposite of how you’re supposed to build software, and it’s the whole reason the results look like the real apps instead of a rough impression of them.

Fast and real pull against each other

Build the fast way and you make one component and reuse it everywhere, and every screen comes out tidy and interchangeable — you can feel that a machine spaced it all perfectly. Real apps aren’t like that. They’re a pile of specific little decisions made by specific teams over years, full of small inconsistencies you’ve quietly memorized without ever being told to. The only way to copy that lived-in mess is to copy each decision by hand. Here, the slow road is the only one that arrives.

Believability isn’t spread evenly

The thing I keep from it is that realness doesn’t sit uniformly across a screen — a few small things carry most of it, and they’re rarely the ones you’d guess. A plausible web address resting quietly at the top of a fake browser sells the illusion harder than anything happening in the center of the frame. So does one click setting several things in motion at once — a badge, a number, a banner all updating together — because that’s how real software actually answers you. Get those right and the eye mostly stops interrogating the rest. The smaller giveaways I chased are in the films themselves: Ten Apps, Rebuilt by Hand.

There’s a pride in the hard road

I won’t pretend the tedium was fun. But there’s a specific, stubborn satisfaction in doing something the slow way on purpose and watching it land in a way the fast way never could. It’s the same instinct behind placing every element by hand: the little irregularities are what make a thing read as something a person built, not something a machine arranged.

Watch all ten

Here are the ten rebuilt apps, in order: