Designing and building a tarot app into the app stores

01I wanted to set a challenge for myself

I wanted to see if I could build something entirely on my own: not a weekend prototype that stays a prototype, but a real, finished product that makes it through App Store and Play Store review and stays live. Quiet Tarot became that challenge. Quiet Tarot is live and can be downloaded from App Store and Google Play. Quiet Tarot is live and can be downloaded from App Store and Google Play.

02Tarot is interesting because it combines system with symbolism

Tarot interests me as a system. It’s a fixed deck, and structured enough to have internal logic underneath. However, it also has a deep and rich history of symbolism.

What’s actually interesting is that the structure is rigid and the meaning isn’t. The deck doesn’t change, but what a reading actually says depends entirely on the person doing it. That’s a genuinely satisfying thing to mechanize: a system that’s fixed on the surface and open underneath.

I wanted Quiet Tarot to take that seriously. Beautiful, free to download, and completely ad-free, rich and considered enough to be worth using on its own, with a clear, honest premium tier underneath for people who wanted to go further.

03Something different than tarot’s usual aesthetic

Most tarot apps I’d seen leaned hard into specific aesthetics: gaudy colour, mystical clip art, the whole cheap fortune-teller look. I wanted to see what happened if the same content got real design attention instead: considered typography, real interaction design, illustration that didn’t feel pulled from a Halloween store.

I started in wireframes to get the flow and structure right, then moved to a handful of high-fidelity screens to nail the aesthetic direction before building anything.

The initial scope was narrow on purpose: a daily draw, a three-card Past, Present, Future spread, a way to journal and track past readings, and enough content per card to feel rich without everything being a wall of text.

Based on my initial explorations, I settled on a color paletted that felt contemporary, but still had some visual connection with the mysticism and the heritage of tarot. I created a few hi-fidelity sketches before moving into code.

04Building my own tools to write and test Quiet Tarot

Writing and reviewing content for every card, across every position in every spread was quite the challenge. Across every card, both orientations, and every spread position, the final content came to roughly 55,000 words, closer to a short novel than a set of card meanings. Across every card, both orientations, and every spread position, the final content came to roughly 55,000 words, closer to a short novel than a set of card meanings. Initially I started in Excel, and later moved to Notion. Both options turned out to become unwieldy at scale.

In the end, I restructured my content into separate JSON files and built my own internal tool for it. Something simple to draft, tag, and review each card’s copy without needing to touch code to publish an edit.

Before launch, I also built a testing tracker to work through the app methodically: every screen, every state, every edge case, checked off one at a time. Accessibility sat on that list from the start rather than getting bolted on afterward, down to the last detail: screen reader support, colour contrast, a reduced-motion mode, and support for text zoom.

05Getting Quiet Tarot into both App Store and Google Play Store

You can get a working app in a handful of days. Getting all the details right, everything working at scale, and the build approved in the app stores takes months.

Design and development are usually two different jobs. On Quiet Tarot, they became one continuous process. I built everything from the ground up, standardized, templated, and captured directly into a design system in code. This meant that once the platform of the app was built, rolling out new features was relatively easy while retaining high quality and consistency. Similar to other projects, my core belief is that understanding and designing a system means you can build and scale output and quality.

On top of that, I found many other ways to speed up design productivity through code. For example, I made my own logo tool to fine tune the logo and font pairing. I initially designed in Adobe Illustrator, and quickly iterated to hundreds of variations through my new tool. The sunburst mark takes its shape from a monstrance, the ornamented vessel to display ideas of radiance and reverence. Source The sunburst mark takes its shape from a monstrance, the ornamented vessel to display ideas of radiance and reverence. Source

Quiet Tarot is built in React Native, which meant most of the actual code, the reading flow, the content, the core interactions, could be shared between iOS and Android from one codebase.

It also meant living with two separate review processes, two sets of platform conventions, and native modules (in-app purchases, haptics) for the parts that are not shared between the tech stack.

06Quiet Tarot is live, and it’s steadily increasing traction

Quiet Tarot is receiving mostly five-star reviews now and has a small but steadily increasing stream of subscribers.

Starting something is always easier than finishing it. The idea, the wireframes, even a first working build, came together in weeks. Everything after that, the accessibility pass, two full sets of store review guidelines, the actual polish, took months.

What I actually learned was how much of “finished” has nothing to do with interface design. It’s the underlying architecture, everything tested until it behaves consistently, accessibility done properly, consistent content across every card, the store metadata, and the second and third rounds of review feedback.

But I am glad I did it.

You can try Quiet Tarot for free: App Store and Google Play.