Pro Se Software

Decibelle · for the household of two

Part one was irritation: Sonos stopped updating their desktop app and said it would never be rebuilt for Apple Silicon — by the end, getting it unstuck usually meant reinstalling it. So I built the controller they used to ship. It lives in the menu bar, finds the speakers on the local network over SSDP and Bonjour, groups and ungroups rooms, and drives Spotify playback. It does what I want and nothing else.

Part two was the unhinged sequel. I asked my wife if she wanted it on her computer — she didn't, she wanted an app. I pointed out the Sonos app works fine. "But it's not very pretty like your app." So I built an app that didn't need making: same engine, dressed for her. It strips out everything we don't use — which, in Spotify's case, is most of it. Their own app keeps shoveling podcasts, audiobooks, and algorithmic filler at us, and using it has started to feel like paying money to subsidize someone else's Joe Rogan experience. Decibelle is just our music. It adds a pin grid so the playlists and albums in heavy rotation live on the front screen, and got the fun details — the pulsing wordmark, custom Loved Songs and Discover Weekly tiles I like better than Spotify's own.

And here's where being an IP attorney becomes the relevant credential: Decibelle can never be sold. Spotify's developer policy flatly prohibits commercial use of apps that stream their content — no selling the app, no ads inside it — and development-mode API access caps out at five authenticated users. The bigger "extended quota" tier is reserved for registered businesses that already have a quarter-million monthly active users, and even they can't sell a streaming app. I read the developer terms the way I read everything — occupational habit — and the honest conclusion is that the door to "$0.99 on the App Store" is welded shut by policy, not by code. So it remains what it is: software for a household of two, working flawlessly for its entire addressable market.

• SwiftUI
• Sonos local UPnP
• SSDP · Bonjour
• Spotify Web API
• TestFlight

My wife is a neuroscientist who travels about half the time and has very poor eyesight. The same 5 a.m. questions kept coming up — what's the weather where I'm going, what are the dates, can you open the calendar while I pack — so I put the answers in one place she can read from across the room.

My first thought was that if my smart TV could host a pile of disorganized streaming apps I'll never open, surely it could host an indie app for two people. That was naive. Smart TV platforms don't anticipate anyone coding for just their own home — they mostly broker deals over who gets top billing on the home screen, which ends up looking like something an ADHD squirrel with a subscription addiction would make. So: a Raspberry Pi.

The shared calendar lives in iCloud, and the Pi is the brain in front of it: it pulls events over CalDAV, folds in weather, renders the wall display in a Chromium kiosk, and publishes the same data as a JSON feed. A local Qwen model on the Pi audits new entries and fixes what Siri does to my voice ("coffee with chris evan's" becomes "Coffee with Chris Evans"). I considered a cloud model for that pass, but a local one costs nothing per token — and for this job, anything bigger would be a small atomic weapon to kill a mosquito. The server only listens on localhost; Tailscale lets the phone reach it from anywhere without exposing anything to the internet. No paid APIs, no cloud LLM calls — every bit of AI runs on the phone or on the Pi.

The dashboard went through roughly eight design generations to get something legible from ten feet that reads like a printed almanac rather than a smart-home product: editorial typography, a painted botanical ground with falling petals, automatic day/night theming. It's a rare case where the form is the function — if it weren't genuinely nice to look at, it wouldn't get used, full stop.