Charlie Chapman

Charlie Chapman is an app developer, designer and podcaster from St. Louis, Missouri. He spent the early part of his career as a .NET and web developer before deliberately switching to iOS development, and shipped his first major indie app, Dark Noise, in August 2019. Dark Noise is a fast, richly animated ambient-sound and white-noise app for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac, known in the Apple community for its design polish, deep Shortcuts and Siri support, and quick adoption of new platform features like interactive widgets, Live Activities and the Dynamic Island.

In January 2020 he started Launched, an interview podcast in which app makers walk through the story of releasing and growing their products. The show later became Launched by RevenueCat and now also runs live episodes at conferences such as Deep Dish Swift and Arctic Conference. Chapman joined RevenueCat as a developer advocate and is now its lead developer advocate, speaking at iOS conferences about paywalls, subscriptions and App Intents, and running community events like the Shipaton hackathon. He also organizes the STL Swift meetup in St. Louis.

He is unusually open about the business side of indie apps. He has published Dark Noise sales and analytics posts, wrote about a 2022 slump in sales when a paid-up-front app went months without updates, and in April 2023 relaunched it as Dark Noise 3.0 with a free tier and subscriptions. Apple has also featured Dark Noise as a pre-installed demo app on display Macs in its retail stores. Alongside Dark Noise he released Overviewer, a free app that turns an iPhone into a document camera for teachers on video calls.