Every app is its own world: how Commercium makes apps

Commercium is a small studio in London. We make apps for iPhone and the browser: a card duel, a daily writing ritual and a presentation maker. This is the first post on our new site, so it is a good place to say how we think about what we make.

A studio of small, specific apps

Each of our apps does one thing. Three Seals is a card duel against three masters in a night temple. 369 Zone helps you write one intention, three, six and nine times a day. SlideForge turns a topic into a finished presentation.

They have very little in common on the surface. One is a game with karate animals. One is a calm journal. One is a tool for work. That is on purpose. We would rather make three apps that each do their job well than one app that tries to do everything.

Why each app gets its own world

An app is a place you visit, sometimes many times a day. So we give each one a world of its own: a palette, a typeface, a way of moving and, where it fits, characters.

• Three Seals lives in a night temple. Lanterns sway, fireflies drift and the masters, a squirrel, a tortoise and an owl, sit across the table. The type is round and friendly, and the gold of a winning seal is the brightest thing on screen.
• 369 Zone is quiet. Warm white, one orange, lots of space. A breathing exercise sets the pace before you write, so the whole app feels slower than the rest of your phone.
• SlideForge looks like a clean studio. Neutral light, crisp type and Kai, its mascot, who keeps a tool for work friendly.

The home page of this site shows this directly. Each app has a chapter, and as you move into it the page takes on that app’s colours, type and motion. The studio frame around the chapters stays black and white, so each world can land on its own.

What stays the same in every app

Worlds can be different. Some rules should not be. These three hold across everything we release, and we wrote them from the apps’ own store listings rather than from a wish list.

Free to start. Every app is a free download. Where something costs money, the price and the terms are shown before you pay.

Offline where it matters. A card duel should work on a train. Three Seals plays fully offline, keeps your progress in your own iCloud and has no ads, no accounts and no data collection.

Your words stay yours. 369 Zone and SlideForge can draft with AI, and every line can be edited, refined or replaced before you keep it.

How we build

We are a small team, so we keep the loop short: build, test on real devices, ship, listen, repeat. By 24 September 2026 we had shipped 375 builds to App Store Connect, the service Apple uses for app releases. Most of them were test builds that never reached the store; that is the point. Small, frequent releases are how we catch problems before you do.

We apply the same care to this website. It moves one step per gesture, respects the reduced motion setting on your device and shows every word even without JavaScript. We wrote up how that works in One gesture, one step.

What you will find on this blog

Notes from the studio, in plain English:

• guides to our apps, such as how to play Three Seals, the 3-6-9 method and how SlideForge builds a deck;
• how we design and build, including the parts that did not work the first time;
• news when an app reaches a new platform or a new version.

If you would like to follow along, there is an RSS feed. If you have a question for the studio, write to us.