Daniel Kuntz

Open Sourcing Any Distance

Today I’m open sourcing Any Distance, a fitness tracker app I worked on alongside several others for almost 5 years. Any Distance started out as a way to share beautiful graphics of your workouts to social media. It eventually grew into a venture backed startup set on dethroning Strava. While we never got anywhere close to that goal, or even product market fit (imo), we ended up building a lot of fun software that I’m still proud of today. Any Distance won an Apple Design Award for visuals and graphics in 2023. I’ve been surprised and delighted to see the design community’s continued interest in what we built. Every so often, I’ll see a sudden download spike coming from posts on X. A lot of this has been spearheaded by people like Raffi Chilingaryan and his project, Spotted in Prod. There’s a renaissance of beauty and craft in iOS software happening right now, and I’m honored that people still use our work as a source of inspiration. Since mid 2023, the app has been in “maintenance mode.” I don’t want to get into the gory details of what exactly precipitated this, but I will say that it was a fairly common combination of classic startup failure modes – co-founder issues, PMF (or rather a lack thereof), burnout, and fundraising challenges. For the past 2 years I’ve struggled to figure out what to do with the project short of killing it completely, which I really don’t want to do. The app still has a small set of users and doesn’t require that much time, effort, or money to maintain while I work on other projects. I’ve spoken to about 10 potential acquirers at this point, but none of them felt right. I’ll be honest: I’m protective of this project. It took up so much of my time and energy for a very long time. It would be painful seeing it turn into something that’s not up to my personal standards, even if that means a payday for me. I didn’t consider open sourcing Any Distance until very recently. But the moment I had the thought, it felt like the right thing to do. Out of all feasible remaining futures, I think one where people can use our work to build new products in the spirit of Any Distance would make me the most happy. Anyone who knows me knows I have a love-hate relationship with SwiftUI and Apple platforms in general. I still think there aren’t enough good examples of SwiftUI in production codebases. Apple will show you 100 ways to make a barebones todo list that the compiler can barely type-check in reasonable time, but anything more complex than that and you’re out on your own. Because there’s so little SwiftUI code out there, LLMs struggle to be very useful beyond boilerplate. I spent a lot of time experimenting with various combinations of SwiftUI, UIKit, and Metal to make Any Distance as beautiful and performant as possible. Lots of what we did still hasn’t been replicated (afaik). I won’t claim that everything we did is the best way of doing things. But it was enough to land us an Apple Design Award. View the source code for Any Distance The app will also continue to live on the App Store for now. As of June 2025 I have no plans on taking it down, since it breaks even and doesn’t require much maintenance. The second part of this blog post is hosted on Spotted in Prod. Click below for a deep dive into some of my favorite parts of the app, featuring screen recordings, commentary, and short code snippets. Thanks again to Raffi & Joe for helping showcase Any Distance in an interactive format and for their eagerness to help the iOS community. Read the rest on Spotted in Prod




June 20, 2025