Background

Every group of friends has the same argument. Somebody dealt it, nobody will admit it, and there is no way to settle it. Hoof Harted settles it — with a preposterously over-engineered detector that takes the job far too seriously.

Everyone's names go into the phone. You pick a scan — Smell Scan for who dealt it, Smart Scan for the smartest person in the room, Funny Scan for the funniest — and a radar sweep runs with sound and haptics before the verdict screen names one person in big red letters: TARGET IDENTIFIED, a confidence score, and a margin of error of “total.”

It senses nothing. That is the entire joke — and the name is one too. Say it out loud.

The Challenge

A joke app sounds like a weekend project. Shipping one to the App Store is not.

• A joke Apple will approve. Apple's guideline 1.1.6 rejects apps with “trick/joke functionality,” and a fake detector is exactly the kind of app it has in mind. The product had to be designed from the first commit to be honest about what it is.
• The payoff is fifteen seconds long. The whole product is a short build-up and one reveal in front of a group. If the sweep stutters, the sound lands off the beat, or the verdict hesitates, the joke dies in the room.
• A performance bug that hid on first run. Early builds froze for about ten seconds on the first scan of every session. It survived a full day of debugging and eleven builds.
• Two stores, one small team. iOS and Android from one codebase, with subscriptions, age ratings, privacy disclosures, and store listings for each.

Our Approach

Compliance by design, not by argument. The players name the suspects themselves, the draw is uniformly random, and the verdict screen says so in plain words: a GAME label and “Results are randomly generated.” The app asks for no sensor permissions of any kind. It is a toy that knows it is a toy — which is also why Pro can offer a “Rigged Job” that lets you pick the culprit in advance.

Sound as a first-class feature. Every sound in the app is synthesized by code from a seeded generator, so the audio is deterministic and reproducible, and our automated checks fail if the shipped files ever drift from the generator. The sound design borrows the language of classic sci-fi motion trackers and sonar — a rising pitch ladder and a “return” echo as the sweep closes in.

A game engine you can test without a phone. The round logic is pure TypeScript driven by an injected clock, so timing, draws, and edge cases are covered by unit tests rather than by tapping through a simulator.

Measure, then fix. The first-scan freeze was traced with a frame-counter probe to its cause: the audio playback rate was being rewritten on every tick — 300 native calls per round, each costing roughly 80 ms of the iPhone's UI thread. Knowing the mechanism beat guessing at symptoms.

Private by default. There is no backend, because there is no server. No account, no sign-up, no ads, and no analytics — the names you type stay on your phone.

Results

• Live on the App Store on September 16, 2026 — 20 days after the first commit. The app, both subscriptions, and the subscription group were all accepted.
• Live on Google Play on October 1, 2026 — Android was submitted to Google Play's production track on September 14, 2026.
• Built with Claude end to end — all 215 commits were co-authored with Claude, from the game engine to the store listings.
• Subscriptions proven on the live build — an in-house purchase with real money on the App Store version went through end to end.

What Players Say

Why It Matters

Hoof Harted is the lightest thing takgio has ever shipped, and it went through the same process as the heaviest: design around the rules, measure before fixing, claim only what ships. Idea to App Store in under three weeks is what that process buys when it's pointed at a consumer app — and it's the same speed we bring to client work.