![]() Towards the end of the summer holidays, just before I started Year 11, I released “Keep Calm Creator” for iOS. Over that spring and summer I got up to speed with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. The big appeal of getting a Mac was that I could use Xcode to write iOS apps. In May 2012 an uncle gave me a hand-me-down iMac. The original iOS version of “Keep Calm Creator” (August 2012) I’d never had a job before, so I was delighted to discover that I could turn my hobby into a side hustle. 2 Within a few days I had a modest, steady income. I charged 50p for the app, and advertised it from the free Android app. In March 2012, a few weeks after I turned 15, I released “Keep Calm Pro”, which added far more features, including changing the background to a custom image. I added alternatives to the poster’s crown and I followed it up with another app that did the same for Kitchener’s WWI posters, though this was not nearly as successful. Over the next few months the app went from strength to strength. The decision to make a free app was a good one: it quickly grew more popular than its competitors. This was long before the era of teenagers becoming overnight influencers on TikTok with millions of views, so it felt like a big deal. Within a couple of days it had been downloaded over 1,000 times. To my great surprise the app was popular. I hadn’t tested the app on a device as I didn’t have a smartphone yet. I released my app for free on the Android Marketplace - Google Play didn’t exist yet! - knowing that I could probably compete favourably with the features of the existing apps. That first version of “Keep Calm” was nothing more than a simple form that changed the background colour and the text of the poster. The original Android version of “Keep Calm” (January 2012) A handful of cheap apps already existed, but none were free. ![]() I’d been looking for an idea for a new Android project, and it struck me that I could probably write a similar Android app. I was learning by hacking together simple projects for fun: I had no formal training. By this point in my teens I’d been programming for a few years. Meanwhile, over Christmas I’d been playing with Java and Android development. This was the year of the London Olympics: kitschy British merchandise was in. Over the subsequent decade the poster’s popularity grew, spurning everything from mugs to T-shirts to parodies. 1 They destroyed most of the original prints early in the war, but an original was rediscovered and displayed at Barter Books, Alnick in the early noughties. The British government’s propaganda department designed the poster ahead of the Second World War but never used it. As we chatted, he showed me an iPhone app for creating custom “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters. This was unusual at the time iPhones had only been available in the UK for a little over 4 years, so by early 2012 hand-me-downs were still uncommon, let alone brand new devices. Before then most teenagers I knew had some combination of an iPod, a Blackberry, or a “camera phone”. We’d just come back from the Christmas holidays and smartphones were slowly becoming commonplace. On a rainy January morning nine years ago I sat in my Year 10 form room.
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