How I built Tilemory — a privacy-first photo sliding puzzle in Flutter

Stephen

Stephen

— 1 min read
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Some photos you never delete, but never really look at again either. Tilemory
started from that feeling. It turns one of your own photos — your kid, your
pet, a trip, an ordinary good day — into a sliding-puzzle board: crop it,
slide the tiles back into place, and when it's whole again you keep a little
"memory card" you can share. It's meant to feel like a small wooden puzzle in
your hands, not a high-score grind.

This is about the decisions behind it — especially privacy — and the Flutter build.

The decisions I didn't compromise on

  • On-device by default. Photos are processed on your device (crop, puzzle,
    history, share previews). Nothing is uploaded to my servers.
  • No accounts, no ads, no tracking. No login, no ad SDK, no third-party analytics.
  • One-time Pro, not a subscription. Replay analysis, HD export, watermark-free
    cards, more templates — a single lifetime purchase.
  • A daily challenge, so you and a friend play the exact same board and shuffle.

The tech

One Flutter codebase ships iOS + Android. A few choices:

  • On-device content safety: an optional NSFW check runs locally via TFLite —
    no image leaves the device, and it's off by default.
  • On-device QR decoding: the "same daily board as a friend" feature scans QR
    with ZXing via FFI, not a cloud / ML Kit service — keeps the privacy posture
    and permission surface minimal.
  • The memory card is rendered via a RepaintBoundary captured to an image, so
    the shared output is pixel-identical to the preview.
  • Daily images ship bundled as an offline fallback and refresh from a small
    remote manifest — the daily challenge works offline and stays fresh online.
  • The site (tilemory.app) is a small Go service; deep links are verified via
    .well-known (App Links / Universal Links).

Why privacy as a default

It's a photo app. The least surprising thing should be that your photos stay
yours — which also means there's simply no data collection to declare on
either store.

Launch

Tilemory is on iOS and Android now (tilemory.app). It's a solo project —
feedback very welcome, especially on the on-device approach.

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