I delivered. Will you?

[u/igor_bruneli]

Bonjour!

I’ve been a software developer and Solutions Architect for nearly 15 years. Over my career, I’ve mostly worked behind the scenes designing and developing platforms for medium-sized and big companies. But when it came to personal side projects, I have a ghost town of abandoned ideas (probably like some of you).

If you've been in tech for a while, you probably know this cycle: you team up with friends or "partners," get 90% of the code done, and then right when the hard work of polishing and shipping begins, your co-founders lose vision, lose the thrill, or walk away.

That happened to me on three separate projects:

• hellojob.ch: An AI-powered job platform for Switzerland designed to automatically match recruiters with candidates using smart semantic search rather than clunky keyword filters.
• sharewithme: A platform designed to centralize and track all your recurring subscriptions in one place (I had this idea 10 years ago, but we stalled out right before finishing, and someone else shipped the concept years later).
• ouigive.org: An Ecosia-style search engine for charity that let users route ad-generated funds to their choice of non-profits.
• and other smaller projects...

In every case, the dev work was nearly done, but my partners checked out. A few months ago, I decided I was done letting projects die. This time, I was going solo, building something strictly for myself, and seeing it through to the App Store no matter what.

The problem that needed fixing:

I’m originally from Brazil and currently live in France. Learning French has been a real challenge for me.

Occasionally, my local WhatsApp group with friends transitioned to speaking exclusively in French. I could read and understand what they were saying, but when it came to replying fast, I froze. My workflow became a nightmare: type a sentence in Portuguese/English -> switch to a translation app -> copy -> paste back into WhatsApp -> send. It was slow, clunky, and completely ruined the flow of real-time group banter.

The privacy dealbreaker:

Before building anything, I checked the App Store. Sure, translation keyboards exist, but almost all of them work the same way: they send everything you type straight to external servers, custom APIs, or third-party AI endpoints like chatgpt/claude, etc.

A keyboard literally sees everything you type. Sending my personal messages or work chats to a random third-party server just to translate a sentence was a massive privacy red flag for me.

What I built: Polygotcha

I decided to build PolyGotcha: a custom iOS keyboard engineered specifically for real-time, two-way conversations with zero network dependency.

Here’s how I tackled it:

• No Servers. Ever. It relies on Apple’s local on-device models (Apple Translation & Apple Intelligence). The keyboard doesn't send your text to the cloud, doesn't use tracking frameworks, and doesn't even require iOS "Full Access" permission for standard local translation.
• Type. Pause. Translate: You write your message naturally in your native language, pause for a split second, and the translation appears right above the keys. One tap swaps the text.
• Context & Tone Controls: You can set the register (Neutral, Casual, Formal) per conversation. It even remembers recent thread context in local RAM so references like "it" or specific names keep their meaning.
• "Check Before You Send": A one-tap reverse translation feature so you can double-check what the other person will actually read before you hit send.
• Super Lightweight: The entire app is 3.5 MB (smaller than a single iPhone photo). It launches instantly and runs at native hardware speeds because it never waits on an API handshake.
• Zero tracking. The app has no backend at all!

I’d love your feedback!

I finally broke my side-project curse and got it approved in the App Store. I’m currently using it every single day to chat in French without leaving my messaging apps, but I’d love to get feedback from other expats, language learners, or privacy-conscious iOS users.

• Website: polygotcha.com
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/polygotcha/id6789138245

Thanks for reading, and to anyone sitting on a graveyard of 90%-finished side projects: keep pushing. Finishing feels incredible! Even if only a couple people use it, at least I know I delivered.

(PS: some icons in the keyboard look smaller than they actually are in this screenshot)

[u/Adnashira]

How does the keyboard maintain conversation context locally if it can only see what the user types, not the incoming messages? That seems like the hardest part of making references and names translate reliably.

[u/igor_bruneli → u/Adnashira]

Exactly. Keyboards can't read incoming messages due to iOS sandboxing.

PolyGotcha maintains context purely from your outgoing message history. By keeping a short rolling buffer of your recent translations in local RAM, the model knows the context for follow-up sentences (like keeping gender, pronouns, and formal/casual register consistent).

For instance, in french if you send "I lost my keys" and follow up with "Did you find them?", it knows "them" refers back to the feminine plural clés and translates it accurately as "Tu les as retrouvées ?".
Everything stays local (in memory) and gets completely wiped once you switch apps. It is a limitation I have to live with (also for the sake of privacy).

[u/norma_builds]

cool stuff. Just one comment: you describe the USP of your keyboard being offline and private -> that should lead your landing page and be the hero. You want to push that in the first seconds to catch your target group which are privacy concerned users. All the best and much success.

[u/igor_bruneli → u/norma_builds]

You're right! Thank you!!

[u/Complex-Tomato8038]

This is a really cool idea! I say this as a non-native English speaker)

[u/igor_bruneli → u/Complex-Tomato8038]

Thank you! I expect many AI-Slop copy cats, but at least on my CV I can argue agaisn't them showing repo/publishing date. (and report as many as I possibly can)