I shipped an iOS app in 10 days because I couldn't find a saved recipe

The actual moment that broke me: I saved a pasta recipe on TikTok three months ago. Couldn't find it. Checked TikTok favorites -- gone (creator deleted it). Checked Instagram saved -- not there. Checked YouTube Watch Later -- 400 videos deep, no way I'm scrolling through that.

I realized I had saved posts scattered across six different apps and not one of them talked to the others. Every platform has its own "save" button, its own folder, its own search -- and none of it is connected. Half the time the saves disappear when creators take down their content.

So I built ARCHV (pronounced "archive"). One app, one library. You hit share in any app -- TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, Reddit, Pinterest, whatever -- tap "Save to ARCHV," and it grabs the title, thumbnail, and URL into a single searchable library on your phone.

The technical stuff that was harder than expected:

1. Every platform shares URLs differently. Instagram sends a blob of text with the URL buried in it. TikTok wraps everything in a vm.tiktok.com redirect. Pinterest sends a pin.it short link that needs to be resolved. Getting the share extension to handle all of these reliably took more time than the rest of the app combined.

2. Deep linking is a mess. When someone taps a saved Instagram post, they want it to open in the Instagram app -- not Safari, not the IG home screen. iOS suppresses Universal Links after "Back to app," so we had to decode Instagram's shortcode format into numeric media IDs to open specific posts directly. Took three days to crack that one.

3. Building privacy-first is a real constraint, not a feature bullet point. No backend means no crash reporting, no analytics, no error logs. When someone says "it doesn't work," I have nothing to go on. Everything is on-device. I literally cannot see what anyone saves. That's the point, but it makes debugging way harder.

What's working:

• The share extension is the core loop. People use it multiple times a day once they start.
• Auto-categorization (recipes, tutorials, music, etc.) was a late addition that turned out to be the feature people mention most.
• Import from Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook -- you can pull in your existing saves and get everything in one place.

What I'd do differently:

• Start with metadata scraping earlier. I ended up building a multi-strategy fallback chain (oEmbed, mobile HTML scraping, URL-based extraction) and I keep having to patch it as platforms change their HTML.
• Spend less time on features nobody asked for and more time making the core save-and-find loop faster.

It's free with 50 saves. Pro unlocks unlimited saves, imports, and iCloud sync.

iOS only for now. Happy to answer questions about the build, the App Store review process, or the deep linking rabbit hole.

https://apps.apple.com/app/archv/id6760729121