One of my apps is Beautiful HD Wallpapers — a wallpaper app for iOS and Android that I built in 2013. It has crossed 50 million downloads since launch.
The codebase has grown significantly over the years. Legacy Objective-C alongside SwiftUI, a component structure that reflects decisions from different eras, memory leak patches layered on top of each other. To be honest, there are parts of the code I'd rather not open. Keeping up with iOS version changes, fixing crashes, gradually migrating from UIKit to SwiftUI — doing all of that alone takes a real toll.
From February 2026, over six weeks, I integrated Antigravity (an agent-style AI coding assistant similar to Cursor) into the actual maintenance workflow for this app. Here's my honest report.
What I Tried, and What I Expected
Here's what I thought Antigravity might handle well:
Generating comments and explanations for legacy Objective-C code. Suggesting performance improvements in UICollectionView. Pasting Crashlytics crash logs to identify reproduction paths. Summarizing user feedback from TestFlight review comments.
And here's what I assumed from the start it couldn't do:
Interpreting current App Store review guidelines. Making real UX design calls. Curating image content.
Where It Worked Better Than Expected
Crash log analysis was genuinely useful.
Pasting a Crashlytics stack trace and asking "what's causing this crash?" would return responses like: "There appears to be a race condition between the main thread and a background thread in the UICollectionView cell reuse logic, likely around line XX."
Pinpointing crash causes used to take one to two hours per issue. With Antigravity, a workable hypothesis appears in twenty to thirty minutes.
Explaining old Objective-C code also held up well.
This app still has code written between 2013 and 2016, and frankly there are methods where I've forgotten why I wrote them that way. Asking Antigravity to "write a Japanese comment explaining what this method does" produced surprisingly accurate descriptions. It has effectively become a substitute for documentation.
Where It Honestly Fell Short
Context loss was more frequent than I expected.
The Beautiful HD Wallpapers codebase spans tens of thousands of lines. Antigravity can only hold what fits in its context window, so when I asked "does this align with the image cache design we discussed earlier?" — it would sometimes respond as if hearing about the cache design for the first time.
Maintaining coherence across a session required me to re-explain "the assumptions for today" at the start of each conversation. That overhead was more significant than I'd anticipated.
The "plausible but off" SwiftUI migration problem.
When I asked Antigravity to help migrate UIKit components to SwiftUI, the generated code was syntactically correct but often missed the app-specific behavior — particularly the timing relationship between lazy image loading and the display animation.
The same misalignment kept appearing across multiple attempts. Eventually I decided to write that section myself.
The Honest Conclusion After Six Weeks
Antigravity is not a tool for handing off everything. It's a tool for augmenting your own judgment. That's the realistic conclusion.
After twelve years of building apps independently, I've come to believe that a solo developer's strength lies in deep domain knowledge and the speed of decision-making. Antigravity improves implementation speed. But domain knowledge — knowing what users of Beautiful HD Wallpapers actually expect from the experience — lives only in my own head.
Being clear about that boundary from the start prevents both over-reliance and unnecessary disappointment.
Going forward, I plan to use Antigravity for specific, repeatable tasks: crash analysis, code commenting, test skeleton generation. Design decisions and UX details I'll continue to handle myself.
If you're an indie developer dealing with the same tradeoffs, I hope this gives you something concrete to work with.