Hi 👋🏿 My name is Carlton Aikins, and I'm a student at the University of Southern California 🌴 studying 🛠️ Computer Engineering

I started building at 14, right before COVID, and shipped my first mobile app — Elisha, an offline Bible and church app — to the App Store and Play Store at 15. Everything since has been a variation on that: pick something people actually need, ship it, and keep shipping until it's good.

I'm building Stora, an AI-powered App Store and Play Store submission platform. App submission is the least fun part of shipping a mobile app — metadata, screenshots, review guidelines, rejections that arrive three days later — and most of it is mechanical enough that an agent can do it.

Alongside Stora I keep a handful of smaller projects alive: Plynn, a free on-device dictation app for the Mac that never sends audio to a server; Versed, a spaced-repetition iOS app for memorizing Bible verses; and Mobile Use, an experiment in driving mobile devices with natural language.

In practice I bias toward software that is fast, works offline where it can, keeps your data on your device where it can, and does not ask for more attention than it earns. That is why Plynn does its speech recognition entirely on your Mac, and why Versed syncs through your own iCloud rather than a server I control.

I write about engineering, product, and distribution — usually the unglamorous parts, like how to structure a Flutter project, or how to get anyone to notice a side project you just shipped.