Quentin Zervaas

Quentin Zervaas is an Australian independent iOS developer best known as the creator of Streaks, the habit-tracking to-do list for iPhone and Apple Watch that won an Apple Design Award in 2016. He runs Crunchy Bagel, a small bootstrapped app studio in Adelaide, South Australia.

Zervaas has been self-employed for most of his career, working as a web developer in Adelaide since 2003. In the PHP era he ran the tutorial site phpRiot and wrote Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP, published by Apress in late 2007. He has said he never made a deliberate leap to independence: he freelanced on the side, his employer closed, and he kept going on his own. He also organised CocoaHeads Adelaide.

Streaks launched in June 2015, with Zervaas programming and designer Isaac Forman shaping its bold, icon-driven look. It began as a prototype he built for himself; because it was useful, he kept improving it until it became a product. The app lets people pick a small set of daily habits, ticks some off automatically from Apple Health data, and was among the early showcase apps for Apple Watch. A year after launch it won an Apple Design Award at WWDC 2016, and Apple has featured it repeatedly since.

Crunchy Bagel has grown Streaks into a family of apps: Streaks Workout for short equipment-free sessions, Little Streaks to help children build routines, HealthFace for showing Apple Health data on a watch face, Outcast, a standalone podcast player for Apple Watch, the LEGO collection tracker Afolio, and the word game Hexiled. Zervaas localises his apps into as many as 25 languages and leans on automation such as Fastlane to manage thousands of screenshots.

He is a good example of the long-running Apple-platform indie: a paid, bootstrapped app that has stayed on the App Store for a decade, supported by a cluster of smaller companion apps rather than outside funding.