I forgot what episode I was on, so naturally I built an entire app

There is a specific kind of defeat in opening a show after six months and realizing every episode thumbnail looks familiar.

Was I on episode 5? Episode 6? Did I finish the season? Is the streaming service’s progress bar telling the truth, or is it remembering the time I fell asleep with autoplay on?

I wanted one quiet app that knew the answer. That became Mothlit.

It was going to be local and simple

The first idea was local-first tracking: add a show, check off episodes, close the app. No account ceremony. No feed. No system trying to turn television bookkeeping into engagement.

That still exists. Then I made the classic developer mistake of saying, “Sync across devices would be useful.”

Mothlit now has an Expo app, a Cloudflare Worker API, D1 storage, authentication, social login, ratings, comments, reactions, profiles, imports, notification preferences, and enough migration files to qualify for municipal status.

Simple survived in the interface. It did not survive in the repository.

The stuff I actually care about

Mothlit tracks shows, movies, seasons, episodes, watch history, favorites, custom lists, and a Watch Next queue. Metadata is localized across 14 languages. TV Time imports exist because asking somebody to manually recreate ten years of television history is how you get your app deleted with prejudice.

The useful loop is still tiny:

• open Mothlit;
• see what is next;
• mark an episode watched;
• leave and watch the thing.

An app should occasionally encourage you to stop using the app. Revolutionary.

Mothlit is also the project that made me stop describing Arid Clown as only a game thing. I love making games, especially weird retro ones. I also love useful software, tiny tools, and apps with one very particular job.

It is in beta now. Account recovery, push notifications, production hardening, and app-store packaging are still on the list. The list has learned to reproduce when nobody is looking.