App Case study
Logic Circuits Simulator
Digital logic design for iPhone, iPad & Mac
Logic Circuits Simulator is a digital-logic design tool for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that I built because the options my classmates and I had were too hard, too expensive, or too dated. It started from a conversation with my digital-electronics professor, grew through three versions shaped by direct, continuous feedback from him and from students, and is now the tool he uses officially to teach, practice, and collect assignments, across three semesters and counting.
- 3 semesters adopted as the official course tool, and counting
- 4.2 ★ rating on the App Store
- 3 platforms iPhone, iPad, and Mac from one codebase
Product lifecycle
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Context
Practicing digital logic at university meant choosing between bad options. Tinkercad was too steep for juniors, Multisim sat behind a subscription, and the iPad apps most of us carried were outdated, overpriced, or full of ads.
In a conversation with my digital-electronics professor about what students should actually use, it became clear the right tool simply did not exist.
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Ownership
I proposed building it, and then I owned it: the product direction, the interface design, the Swift and SwiftUI engineering across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and the release.
Just as important, I owned the feedback loop, working directly and continuously with my professor and with student testers so the app matched how the curriculum is actually taught.
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Discovery & decisions
Validating the idea with a professor who teaches the subject kept the scope honest. I decided to start narrow and earn scope: v1 would nail the fundamentals well rather than cover everything poorly.
Each release after that was driven by what students and testers told me they were missing, not by a feature list I imagined up front.
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Build & ship
I moved quickly from the start. Development began in May 2025, the first test build and round of feedback came in June, and v1 shipped to the App Store in July. v1 covered the fundamentals; v2 improved performance and the interface and added sharing and truth tables; for v3, the version live today, I rebuilt the app from scratch to cover the full curriculum, including clocks, flip-flops, and Karnaugh maps.
The same codebase ships to iPhone, iPad, and Mac, so a student can practice on whatever device they have with them.
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Operate & iterate
The app is live on the App Store, holds a 4.2-star rating, and my professor has adopted it officially: for three continuous semesters and counting, students use it to practice, follow his explanations, and submit their assignments. With around 155 downloads it is a focused audience, but a committed one that uses the app exactly as it was meant to be used.
I run it as an agile loop: real feedback from that audience feeds directly into the next version. That loop is what took it from a fundamentals tool to one that covers the full curriculum, and it keeps shaping where the app goes next.
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Learnings
Starting from a real, observed problem, and validating it with someone who teaches the material, meant I never had to guess whether the app was worth building.
Shipping narrow and letting user feedback pull the roadmap kept each version focused, and committing to a full rebuild for v3 paid off more than patching the old version ever would have.