I am admittedly SUPER late to my year in review this year, largely thanks to college applications, school assignments, and a lot of other things I have gotten myself into. But given the fact that I’m determined to make every year better than the last—the only right choice here is to be better late than never in posting my progress from last year. Here is a rewind to everything I did in 2024, the 2024 goals I achieved (mostly the ones I didn’t), and what I’m setting myself up for in 2025.

Statistics Round-Up

As a part of the annual tradition, let’s start by taking a brief look at the statistical growth of my online presence over the year 2024.

On YouTube, I have certainly not uploaded all that much, but thanks to a few evergreen videos, I’ve had over 128.2K views on YouTube for 2024, which is unfortunately a 17% drop from the previous year. A similar decline has followed for the amount of subscribers and watch hours I gained in 2024. This can be attributed to me inadvertently having less time for YouTube content creation because of my focus on software development lately.

So let’s turn to the software development side of things. In June, I celebrated the one-year anniversary of my company Starlight Apps, which marked a significant milestone in my app development journey. In 2024, apps published by Starlight Apps gained over 18.46K new users, which is a 200% growth from the previous year. The launch of Pencilera and Apple featuring my apps was a huge boost to my apps this year, and I can’t wait to share even more apps and updates with you in 2025. My Siri Shortcuts collection also has had over 185K new users in 2024, which is a nearly 30% growth from 2023. Even though my performance on YouTube has seen better days, I’m happy with what I’ve been able to achieve with Starlight Apps and my Siri Shortcuts and the impact I’ve been able to have.

Starlight Apps

And while we’re at the topic of apps, I’d like to briefly discuss the qualitative progress at Starlight Apps as well. I started off 2024 with the launch of Linkeeper 2.0, which added lots of quality-of-life improvements as well as support for Native macOS and Vision Pro. Linkeeper became the first bookmarking app on the Apple Vision Pro App Store and has been featured by Apple ever since. It was an absolute honor to have been recognized by Apple and being put up on the front page of the Vision Pro app store. I urge you to read my article for a detailed breakdown of my experience and how I got there.

I also launched Pencilera, an app that turns your iPad’s Apple Pencil into a camera remote, and the launch went incredibly well. People ended up loving the app, and although there were a few bugs for M4 iPad Pro users at the start, the launch of v2.0 for Pencilera was received well by everyone, and it turned out to be a fairly successful app in my books.

In June, I also made all of my apps open-sourced, which was a major milestone in my app development journey. Since my apps are already free to use, I think offering them as open-sourced makes sense and serves as a way for me to give back to the community and share what I learnt in the process of building apps myself. There are many small solutions that took me hours to find, and equally many that I came up with myself, and open-sourcing my apps means that everyone can access these solutions and put them into their own apps. It also means that other people can contribute to improving the apps published by Starlight Apps to make the experience even better. I’m looking forward to contributing further to the open-sourced community.

Starlight Apps also develops apps for other companies, and one such app is OneTap. In 2024, we had an incredible run with over 10x growth, and I spearheaded the launch of v4.0 and v5.0, and started working on v6.0. Here, I got to explore a lot of new frameworks, and one of the new things I learnt was hosting a server with Swift, which I wrote a blog post about. OneTap was also ported over to visionOS with its interactions re-imagined for the 3D platform, and OneTap also ended up being featured by Apple on the Vision Pro app store—bringing my Vision Pro app success rate to a solid 100%. 😆

Augmented Reality

On the theme of Vision Pro: if there was one overarching personal theme for 2024, it was Augmented Reality. The year started off with Vision Pro pre-orders and my incredibly contagious excitement for the arrival of my unit. I’ve been using Vision Pro ever since I got it, and it has been one of the most interesting and life-changing experiences. From building two apps for Vision Pro that ended up on the front page of the Apple App Store, to finding and connecting with so many Vision Pro enthusiasts around the world to share my excitement for this platform—my experience with Vision Pro has been more than what the product has to offer. The return on investment has quite frankly justified the price for me. Using Vision Pro itself has also been such a roller-coaster of experiences, and if I were to pick one of the lines from my yet-to-be-released review it would be this: “I keep falling in love with Vision Pro every time I put it on—the honeymoon phase never ended.” It is truly something worth experiencing, but it’s so hard to convey with just words or 2D visuals, and it’s one of the reasons my Vision Pro review has taken so long to craft—I want to make sure I get this review right. But hopefully, I’ll upload one soon.

But using Mac Virtual Display at home has gotten me so used to having a large screen in front of me when working that I would often miss it during school. So, my year ended with another Augmented Reality product: XREAL Air. Now, I’ve had my eyes on these for a while, but for $450—these were too expensive for me to justify because they are nothing but a pair of screens strapped to your head with lenses. And all reviews for the XREAL Air were sponsored, which is why I was also slightly skeptical about this product. But now that they have newer and more capable models released, they are now offering their 2021 XREAL Airs for a significantly more reasonable price of $197, which is pretty much less than what you would have to pay to get two 1080p 120Hz monitors, except you can carry these anywhere you go. So getting these was a no-brainer. They have also been a joy to use, especially in outdoor environments where I can’t get myself to put on something as large as the Vision Pro—the XREALs blend right in by looking like somewhat regular pairs of sunglasses, and that’s what I really like about them. They only have one feature: to have up to three floating monitors anywhere you go, and they do that well.

Creative Exploration: 3D Modeling & Digital Art

I explored quite a bit of 3D modeling and printing this year. From taking the time out to finally assemble my “iMac mini” project that I designed and printed in 2021, to printing a Vision Pro stand, an iPad mini photo frame (more on this soon!), and a lot of other things here and there. I also ended the year with the launch of the AR CyberSpinner, which I modeled in 3D entirely myself in Fusion 360 and animated in Reality Composer Pro for people to experience as a prop on their Apple Vision Pro.

Another fun thing I ended up doing was turning my liquid digital art paintings into physical skins for my devices, allowing me to personalize the tech I use and also make it a little less boring. I ended up wrapping my Magic Mouse, Apple Pencil, and my charger in this skin, and I think it turned out pretty awesome.

Attending Developer Events and Developer Meetups

In April, I met Rudrank at Apple BKC. This was my first time meeting someone from the online world in real life. Most of you probably know Rudrank, but in case you don’t, he’s an Apple Platforms developer, technical writer, and he’s recently been a huge AI-assisted coding enthusiast. Getting a chance to meet a fellow developer who shared my excitement for software development was incredible—it was the first time I met someone other than myself who was interested in Apple Platform development. I’ve kept in touch with him ever since, and in July, he told me about the WWDC24 session taking place at the Apple Developer Center Bangalore. I knew I had to go there, and it was undoubtedly the best experience of the year. If you want to learn a little more about exactly why, I would recommend you read my blog post, but tl;dr: I met tons of new developers, got to share my excitement with others, learn a lot of new things, and made lasting connections. I couldn’t be happier about attending that event.

Blogging

One of the things I also started doing in the middle of last year is blogging. Although the plan was to do weekly blogs, the frequency has been on and off for the most part. Regardless, I’m so glad I started blogging because it has allowed me to share my excitement for the things I’m building in an elaborate manner without the long process of creating an entire YouTube video. It has also been a place for me to share a lot of the solutions I find to problems that I know other people are also likely facing around the world. Blogging has been a reminder of my love for writing. It might not be writing per se, but more so getting to express myself through words. This blog is also one of the reasons that makes writing this 2024 year-in-review post feel odd, as it’s traditionally been a way to share my work but now that I’ve been posting about my work intermittently, repeating it in the review feels strange. But that’s just some food for thought. Anyways, I look forward to continuing this through 2025, and also experimenting with topics outside technology this coming year.

Personal Changes

I think 2024 was also a huge year for me in terms of my personal growth, with a combination of some conscious and some subconscious decisions. I'd like to address some of these now.

Being present in the moment.

While I’ve briefly talked to one of my friends about this, I never really put this up as a “New Year’s resolution” publicly: one of my personal goals for 2024 was to be more present in the moment. To work towards this, I cut down TV usage completely. I no longer watch TV, use my phone, or consume any content when at the dining table. Whether it is when I go out with friends, or simply have daily meals at home—that time is now meant more for spending time with the ones around me instead of endlessly consuming content. I’m happy to report that it significantly improved my presence of mind in conversations and gave me the creative headroom I needed. I haven’t watched TV when eating meals since Jan 1st 2024—except for that one week in October when Apple was doing those mini 15-minute events—and I hope to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. It’s not just TV though, I believe there have been so many other smaller decisions in my day-to-day life that have helped me become more present in the moment, and I’m happy about the progress I’ve made.

Creating rather than consuming

On the theme of reducing content consumption, I’d like to reflect on one of my most defining personal values: to create rather than consume. I’ve been a creator my whole life—whether it was my love for sketching when I was 5, or my love for tinkering with technology ever since I was 8. It’s something I love doing, and I think the motto is self-explanatory. It’s one of the reasons why I seldom watch movies and shows. In 2024, I tried to reduce content consumption on YouTube and Twitter, which is where I spend most of my “consumption time.” I urge you to read my summer break blog post about how I used tools like Ochi and Dumb Phone by Michael Tigas and recommendation blockers on YouTube and Twitter to ensure I am spending the least possible time on these attention-hungry platforms. I don’t think completely eliminating consumption is the right way, since problem-solving requires observation and understanding of the needs of users which consuming content allows me to do, but I believe moderating my consumption goes a long way, and that’s something I’ve tried to do a lot in the latter half of 2024.

Scheduling

I’ve been a pretty on-and-off user of the Calendar app. I’ve used it during online school, and during my board exams to plan out my study sessions, but in 2024—I started using my calendar as a full-time tool. I try to take time out every day to plan out all the tasks I have, it ensures I get all the work done at hand, gives me specific time frames to work on, and ensures I don’t miss out on deadlines or don’t forget about things I was supposed to do. It has quite frankly been game changing to say the very least. This doesn’t work for everyone, but I recommend you try out scheduling in your own life too! It has truly been a huge boost in productivity for me, and also a general motivator for me every morning because I know exactly what I’m going to be doing that day, rather than aimlessly trying to find things to do.

No Cold Beverages, No Ice Creams

This was largely unplanned, but thanks to me falling sick over and over again, I ended up cutting cold drinks and ice creams out of my life. I haven’t consumed cold water or any cold beverage since August, and neither have I had any ice cream. From a health standpoint, I think this has brought a lot of benefits (besides not falling sick repeatedly) because it means that I’m cutting down on my sugar consumption and I’m not reaching for carbonated drinks every time I’m feeling thirsty. I do occasionally miss my ice cream, though.

Re-evaluating my 2024 goals

While 2024 was a fantastic year for me, my 2024 goals list remains largely unachieved. Let me go through them one by one.

Just as a reminder, these were my goals:

• More videos on YouTube

• Ship apps and updates more often

• Win Swift Student Challenge

• 45 Predicted Grade in IBDP

• Get into a top university

More videos on YouTube

I published 3 YouTube videos in 2023, and 6 in 2024. While it is a 2x boost in the number of videos—meaning it ticks off my “more videos on YouTube” goal from a literal standpoint—I think I was hoping for more than just one 6 videos when I set up that goal for myself.

However, I am pleased to say that 5/6 of the videos I uploaded this year performed significantly over my channel’s average. I think my focus has always been quality over quantity, and I’m glad this has stuck with me throughout my content.

Ship apps and updates more often

I did publish one new app, Pencilera, and it was a hit. I’m really proud of this app—it’s simple, yet intuitive, and solves a real-world challenge that is faced by so  many around the world, yet was surprisingly left unsolved for years.

While I did start the year off with a great update to Linkeeper—adding support for visionOS, UI refinements, and getting recognized by Apple—I haven’t been able to push any updates since then, which is unfortunate. I have a great set of features that have been in the works since February last year, including a lot of the features users have requested (such as sub-folders), but I’m still not at a point where I can release v3.0 given my commitments at school and freelance development.

Which ultimately has made me realize the thing that holds me back—the need to ship a “perfect” update. I’m spending too much time bundling features that get held back by one feature that takes forever to implement. For example, Linkeeper v3.0 has a plethora of features that are production-ready today, but are held back by subfolders. Once v3.0 is out, I am going to focus on shipping small updates quicker, without worrying about shipping big bundled updates. I think that is the key to the perfect user experience.

Win Swift Student Challenge

Can’t make up an excuse for this—I simply didn’t try hard enough last year. That said, I hope to rise stronger in 2025 and give the SSC my best to actually go ahead and win. Admittedly, I am incredibly short on time with exams just around the SSC deadline, but I remain determined. I attended Apple’s “Get Ready for the Swift Student Challenge” session late in January 2025 and my new app idea already looks promising. I can’t wait to share it with you!

45 Predicted Grade in IBDP

Well, I came to understand that IBDP predicted grades are out of 42 and not 45, because they only predict your subject scores not the other components such as the EE and TOK Essay. Anyways, I’m at a predicted score of 40/42—not the 42 I aspired to have. I think I’m largely happy with the score I have, but my personal desire for a better score still remains. I’m trying my best to level this score up in the next 4 months leading up to my exam—let’s see where this goes.

Get into a top university

Now, I’ve already given my best shot to my college applications. I’m excited to see where this journey takes me, but the result to this 2024 goal of mine will only be revealed around April. So I think whether I’ve achieved this goal remains uncertain.

Setting up goals for 2025.

To be very honest, I think most of my goals from 2024 would carry over to 2025 as well. While I’ve made some progress on YouTube, app development, and at school, I still strive for more. And winning the Swift Student Challenge and getting into a top university also remain important goals for me in 2025. But one thing I was reminded of in 2024, when I invited a bunch of my friends for Vision Pro demos + lunch, is that I enjoy spending time with friends and having long one-on-one conversations with folks, and I’m looking forward to doing more such things in the future. Along similar lines, I would also love to meet new people this year and possibly also build a collaborative app with someone else and put it on the app store. This year is also a big one for me, because I'll be turning 18 and be heading off to university which is going to be a completely new experience for me, one I'm excited for. I have a lot of other plans for this year as well, especially with Starlight Apps in mind, so I can’t wait to share those with you.

Here’s to another great year, and I hope you accomplish all your 2025 goals and keep up your resolutions throughout.

And now that I’ve finally posted this blog post, I can move onto some of the topics I’ve been meaning to post about for a while but never got the chance to. 2025 already started off with me attending a bunch of developer events and giving my first ever talk, so I can’t wait to share my experience with you. See you soon! Thanks for reading.