Learning iOS development with React Native

I started this project following a JS Mastery tutorial on YouTube. The tutorial covered two pages: a home feed and a search page. That was it. The plan was to follow along, learn the patterns, and get a feel for how React Native works.

I did not stop at two pages.

By the end, I'd rebuilt the navigation, redesigned the UI, and added features the tutorial never touched. Statistics so users can track what they've watched. TV show support alongside movies. Custom lists so you can organize your saves however you want. A saved tab that brings all your collections together in one place. The navigation went from four tabs down to three, each with a clearer purpose, and the profile page got absorbed into home so it actually had somewhere to live.

The tutorial version used a purple and navy color scheme that I kept as a starting point, but pretty much everything else changed. The layout, the hierarchy, how information is organized across screens. At some point it stopped feeling like a tutorial project and started feeling like an actual app I was building.

That's the part I wasn't expecting. Following the tutorial was useful for getting my bearings, but the real learning happened when I closed the video and tried to figure things out on my own. Building the saved lists meant reusing the same logic from the trending algorithm and adapting it, which forced me to actually understand what the code was doing instead of just typing along. Same with the statistics page. I had to think through what data to store, how to surface it, what would actually be useful to a user.

React Native was less intimidating than I thought it would be coming from React. The mental model is the same. Components, props, state. The main adjustment is the primitives: View instead of div, Text for anything written, TouchableOpacity where you'd reach for a button. NativeWind made the styling side easy since it's just Tailwind, so I didn't have to relearn anything there. Appwrite for the backend was new to me (I've only used Supabase before) and it was surprisingly straightforward to pick up.

But for now it feels like a real thing, which is a good feel.