Celebrating 10 Years of Theine for Mac
A decade ago, I released a small piece of Mac culture—and with it, accidentally started my indie developer career.
Theine recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. The little tea cup in the menu bars of over 40,000+ Macs worldwide, keeping macOS reliably awake ever since, holds a special place in my heart: It was my very first app release. On January 16, 2015, at a time when macOS was still called OSX, the app became “Ready for Sale” for the first time. From that moment on, it has been available for download on the Mac App Store—and still is. A truly exhilarating feeling and, as I now know, the beginning of a new chapter in my life.
Trailer for the latest major release of Theine, rendered in 2020 on an Intel MacBook Air with the help of an external GPU
Design Is How It Works
It took a decade of attempts. My first Mac was a PowerPC G5, which I painstakingly saved up for with my apprentice salary in 2005. I mainly used it for design tasks, but whenever it came to user interface design, I felt that defining just how something looked wasn’t enough—I wanted to shape how it was used. And that was only possible by coding functional prototypes and apps. Over the following years, I repeatedly tried to familiarize myself with the programming language Objective-C (the gold standard at the time) and break into development. To no avail.
A Swift Pivotal Moment
On September 9, 2014, Swift was released—Apple’s then-new programming language. Its concepts immediately clicked for me, and the enthusiasm sparked by the WWDC keynote was so overwhelming that I was determined to finally release an app.
High Resolution Caffeine
Keeping your Mac awake was a problem that, in my perspective, had no good solution in 2014. High-resolution Retina Displays were becoming more widespread, and while the app Caffeine already existed, it hadn’t been updated to support them—leaving its menu bar icon a pixelated mess, which was truly painful to a designer’s eye. I felt that there should be an app that felt at home on all Macs, and that met the review guidelines to be accepted into the App Store. The word “theine” is used synonymously for caffeine in tea—both refer to the same molecule. And with that, the idea and name were set. The feature scope also seemed realistic for a first app.
Launch Day
On its first day in the App Store, the app had four downloads from Germany (I personally knew each user), followed closely by the U.S. with three downloads. Despite the low demand, I felt a great sense of responsibility, leading to a series of updates and improvements.
Moving On
My efforts were later recognized by the App Store Editorial Team: Theine was prominently featured in the Utilities category. Unlike today, I was far from being a fulltime indie developer in 2015. App development was just a side project—my focus was on my design studies and my part-time job, which had to fund everything. The bold dream of releasing just one Mac app was fulfilled. So in the following months, I moved on to other things.
The Anomaly
The turning point came on a summer day in 2016. After a long time, I decided to check the download numbers from the past months. The average was about four downloads per day—nothing spectacular. But then I noticed an anomaly: on March 31, over 2,000+ people in South Korea—a country that seemed so distant from my perspective in Germany, one I only knew from documentaries—had downloaded Theine, a software that I created. That felt like an incredible success.
A Moment to Celebrate
It was this experience that planted a conviction in me—the belief that the apps I design could help and delight others. Over the past ten years, I have released countless updates and channeled my experience into developing new apps. Since 2020, I have been a full-time indie developer. Happy birthday, Theine, and thanks to everyone who has stayed loyal to my work and the app over the years.
