Ambre is a recipe app built by two people in Gothenburg, Sweden. César Pinto Castillo wrote the first version to test a new Apple framework, put it on the App Store, and forgot about it. Sofia Larsson, who has a bachelor's in textile engineering and no formal software training, rewrote its views to learn SwiftUI and never stopped. On this episode of Launched, Charlie Chapman gets both origin stories, the Apple program that turned a beginner into a co-founder, and a closing argument about what's left to compete on when AI can build the features.
The $150 Mac that couldn't build iOS apps
César had a computer science degree and a job writing C# for an ad agency when he walked past a shop window in Västerås and saw an iPhone in demo mode, scrolling through contacts. He'd been building for a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and hated everything about it. "I just saw it and I was like, 'Oh my God, this is amazing.'"
That night, a well-known Swedish comedian posted asking whether someone could make him an app. "And I have no idea how to build an app. I didn't have a Mac. I didn't know what Xcode was. I knew nothing," César says. Charlie's follow-up: "Well, you didn't even have an iPhone at this point, right? You just saw one?" He hadn't. He wrote back anyway, agreed a price, and went back to the store to ask what he'd need.
They sold him a returned PowerBook G4 for $150. He installed Xcode, opened the sample project, hit build, and discovered that iOS apps needed an Intel Mac to compile. "So I had to spend all the money I was getting paid to build the app to buy my first Mac. So that's how I got into app development."
The app itself was a blog reader: a WordPress plugin he wrote to expose posts as JSON, pulled into a list. "When there only was one screen size," as he puts it. The commitment came before the tooling, and the fee paid for the tooling. He's been employed as an iOS engineer since 2011.
A CloudKit experiment, forgotten, then handed to a beginner
Around the time CloudKit launched, César built a recipe app to see what the framework could do. Recipes were CloudKit records; you could see other people's. He named it Cooking, shipped it, and moved on. "I put it out there and I forgot about it."
It kept being used. One user had more than a hundred recipes in it, which mattered because of a detail Sofia raises: you couldn't reorder instructions or ingredients. Get a step wrong and you redid the recipe. Charlie: "This is the classic looking for some app as an excuse to try out a piece of technology."
Years later, Sofia wanted to learn to code. She'd started with Swift Playgrounds on an iPad, steering a character called Byte through a maze. César had an app lying around that he wanted rebuilt in SwiftUI. "Why don't you just rewrite all the views?" Charlie's verdict: "Easy first task."
"I started just building up the views and I guess I never stopped because I'm still building the views." Her biggest obstacle wasn't the logic. "I didn't have any terminology. So when I wanted to Google for something, I had to describe what I wanted." Even the word modifier wasn't hers yet. Cooking became Ambre, and Ambre started getting featured on the App Store.
Apple said the call was of utmost importance. It was a two-hour technical interview.
Sofia's plan was to get good enough to be hired as a developer somewhere. Then César saw a post from Apple's Mike Stern about Apple Entrepreneur Camp and told her to apply.
"I was terrified and César said, 'Oh, well, what's the worst thing that's going to happen?' They say no or they say yes. And I said, 'Yeah, that's the worst thing. They can say yes.'" Because then she'd have to do it.
The email that came back said it was imperative to get a call scheduled that week. She asked César what Apple could want. His guess: a five-minute welcome call, they just want to tell you you're in. "Oh, it turned out it was a technical interview for two hours."
She got in. The camp ran virtually during the pandemic, two weeks of DTS hours with Apple engineers, design sessions with Apple designers, and pitch training, on a nine-hour time difference. "We literally slept and ate and coded." What she took from it, she says, is going to sound cheesy: "my confidence, because going in, I felt like such an imposter. I was nervous at every meeting thinking, oh, they're going to call me out." The environment did the opposite. Her first client project followed, with César, across three time zones.
Everyone posted code. She posted about color.
Ambre's marketing, by their own account, has been light: an Instagram account that mostly works as a way for users to reach them. What grew was Sofia's own presence, after César and a contact at Apple all but pushed her into it.
She posted about app development with a tilt toward UI and design, and it found an audience. Her explanation: the community's feed was mostly code — someone found a new API or SDK and tried it out. "Whereas I would like, ooh, this color combination is super nice. And if you put it this way in the layout, it would read much better." Being one of the few people talking about design in a stream of code posts was the differentiation.
Charlie's own first memory of them is a marketing move too. On the roof of the Apple Park Visitor Center, Sofia handed him a card with a QR code. It opened Ambre as an App Clip, inside which another QR code led to a recipe: how to make Swedish fish. Then she pulled a bag of actual Swedish fish out and handed it over. "I watched you do this to other people after me, and we all had the same reaction." His conclusion at the time: these are very fun people.
Does the code really matter anymore?
The episode ends where the edit opens, on a question that a designer-and-engineer pair are unusually well placed to argue. César's position: "With AI today, we can build so much stuff. The thing that's going to put you apart or your product apart from the competition is the experience you offer." The feature set won't do it; design is about to matter more, not less.
He borrows an analogy from a Linux figure he'd seen quoted: complaining that you don't know what AI-generated code is doing is like complaining that you don't read the assembly. "What we own is the UX and quality of our app. Our customers are not going to read the code."
Sofia's version comes from the toolbox. "Procreate is a tool. An iPad is a tool. A pencil is a tool. When you buy watercolor, it's pigment and something that bind the pigment." AI is the next one, and it opens the door for designers who had the idea in their head but not the means to build it. This year that's been her: "I can talk directly with Claude and see my ideas come to life within minutes, hours, depending on the complexity."
Charlie pushes back a little — AI-built things feel similar unless someone is making all the small choices — and César closes with the question he wants developers to sit with: "If you make sure QA is awesome, the app looks amazing and it solves a real problem, does the code details really matter?"
Also in the full episode: what a textile engineer actually studies (geotextiles under airport runways, a thesis on getting a medical bandage to a CE standard), César's detours through blackjack dealing and Volvo factory software, the designers Sofia keeps a running iMessage thread with herself about, and the Ambre update landing with iOS 27.