Case study · Our own product

Yellow Gorilla

A private journal for gamers. From Fans, For Fans.

Year 2025 — 2026
Role End-to-end design + engineering
Platforms iOS · Android
Yellow Gorilla app icon

Challenge

Documenting your gaming life without giving up privacy.

Existing apps for gamers are built around social features: likes, follows, leaderboards. That means your sessions, teams and memorable moments become public data. Yellow Gorilla started with the opposite premise: a 100% private journal where the only person who sees your data is you.

Approach

Privacy by design, not by configuration.

We built on Firebase (Auth, Firestore, Storage) so the data model respects user privacy from the first line of code. No public profiles, no tracking, no behavioral analytics. The UI is native per platform with a shared design system. Each feature is validated against one question: 'does this matter to the user, or only to the product?'

Outcome

In production today, free, on both stores.

Yellow Gorilla is publicly available on App Store and Google Play. The app is free, ad-free, with no in-app purchases or data sale. The roadmap includes opt-in social features to share adventures with friends, keeping privacy as the default.

iOS + Android Platforms in production
$0 User cost
100% Privacy by default

Stack

What we used.

Technologies picked for fit, not for fashion:

  • Native Swift (iOS) + Kotlin (Android)
  • Firebase Authentication with Google Sign-In
  • Cloud Firestore for structured data
  • Firebase Storage for images (JPEG 800×600 compression)
  • In-house design system shared across platforms
App demo · version 1.2

Want to see the product?

The app is available free on both stores. Download it, sign up, and document your first adventure.

Go to product page