From a TV Screen to the App Store

Let me tell you about the dumbest setup that ever shipped an app to the Google Play Store.

Picture this: a 2016 laptop — and I'm being generous calling it that. The battery was dead. Not "lasts 20 minutes" dead. Dead dead. Unplugged it for three seconds and it'd shut off like someone pulled the life support. The screen had seen better days too, so I did what any reasonable person would do: I plugged it into the living room TV via HDMI, grabbed a wireless keyboard and mouse, and sat on the floor like I was about to play PlayStation.

Except I wasn't playing anything. I was trying to build software.

The Choice

The laptop had another charming quirk — it could run either the IDE or the browser. Not both. Pick one. Want to look up a Stack Overflow answer? Close the IDE. Want to go back to coding? Close the browser. Alt-Tab was not a luxury I could afford. It was basically a single-tasking machine in 2020.

I'm not telling you this for sympathy. I'm telling you because it's hilarious in hindsight — and because the app I shipped from that setup is still live, still getting downloads, and still works better than things built in much fancier environments.

The First Ship: Jummal

The app was Jummal (حاسبة الجُمَّل) — an Arabic Abjad numerology calculator. If you're not familiar, Abjad numerals are an ancient system where each Arabic letter has a numerical value. People use it for everything from traditional poetry to spiritual practices. It's deeply rooted in Arabic and Islamic culture, and there was basically nothing good for it on mobile.

So I built it. From the TV. With the wireless keyboard. One window at a time.

Jummal is now on the Play Store with thousands of downloads. Not millions — I'm not going to sit here and pretend it's the next Instagram. But thousands of people use something I built while sitting on the floor, squinting at a 42-inch TV from three feet away. That means something.

Shipping that first app taught me the most important lesson of my career: you don't need permission to start. You don't need the right equipment, the right office, or the right moment. You need an idea, stubbornness, and a willingness to look ridiculous.

Level 2: The Mac

In 2025, I finally bought a MacBook Air M4. If you've never gone from a machine that can't open two windows to an M4 chip, let me describe the experience: it felt like someone removed ankle weights I'd been wearing for years. Everything was instant. Multiple windows? Sure. An IDE and a browser and a terminal and Figma? No problem. The machine didn't even get warm.

When I created my workspace folder, I named it "2ndlvl" — second level. Because that's exactly what it felt like. A genuine level-up. Not just in hardware, but in what I could attempt. The ceiling was gone.

I started building faster. More complex apps. Better architectures. Things I literally couldn't have run on the old laptop. Flutter apps with rich UIs, backend services, CI/CD pipelines — the whole stack opened up.

The Gap

Here's the part nobody tells you about leveling up: you lose things too.

The old laptop died shortly after the Mac arrived. Just... gave up. And with it went my only Windows machine. Suddenly I couldn't build or test for Windows at all. For a while, I tried using GitHub Actions and virtual machines to compile Windows builds. It worked, technically, the way a three-legged chair works — you can sit on it, but you're always one wrong move from hitting the floor.

It was impractical. Slow. Painful. Every Windows build was a deployment pipeline instead of a quick "hit run and see what happens." I dealt with it because I had to, but it was a constant friction point.

Level 3: The Full Stack

Now, in 2026, AzizWares runs 7 published apps serving thousands of users. And I'm building what I call "3rdlvl" — the full platform stack:

MacBook Air M4 — primary development machine
ThinkPad — Windows/Linux coverage, the missing piece
Contabo VPS — servers, deployments, always-on services
Wazir — my AI assistant running on the VPS, handling everything from email to deployment monitoring

Mac + ThinkPad + VPS + AI assistant = every platform covered. Every OS reachable. Every deployment automated. It's what the TV-and-keyboard setup was always trying to become — it just took a few years and a lot of stubbornness to get here.

This is still a one-man studio. Based in Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah, Saudi Arabia. No team. No investors. No fancy office. The apps — Jummal, Mufawtir, Wasil, Salah Bas, and the rest — they're all built, maintained, and shipped by one person. The infrastructure grew, but the team didn't. And honestly? I like it that way.

The Lesson

I could wrap this up with some polished insight about perseverance or the entrepreneurial spirit, but that would be dishonest. The truth is simpler than that.

You don't need the right tools to start. You need the right tools to scale.

The TV setup was absurd. It was uncomfortable, inefficient, and probably bad for my eyesight. But it worked. It got the first app out the door. And once that happened, everything else was iteration — better hardware, better processes, better infrastructure. Each level unlocked the next.

If you're sitting somewhere right now with a terrible setup, wondering if you should wait until you have the "right" equipment to start building — don't. Ship something. Ship it from your phone if you have to. Ship it from a TV with a wireless keyboard.

The setup doesn't matter. The shipping does.

And if someone tells you that you need a certain setup, a certain budget, or a certain team to build real software — show them a one-man studio in Madinah running 7 apps from what started as a dying laptop plugged into a television.

— Abdulaziz Yahya, Founder of AzizWares