Introducing Lome Labs

There’s a particular feeling you get when you use an app that was built with care. You might not be able to pinpoint exactly what it is — maybe it’s the way an animation eases into place, or how a gesture just works without you having to think about it. That feeling is what Lome Labs exists to create.

Lome Labs is an indie app studio based in Atlanta, Georgia. We design and build consumer apps for Apple platforms — starting with games and social experiences for iOS and iMessage. Today, I want to share what we’re about and where we’re headed.

The name

“Lome” is pronounced “Lo-may.” It comes from Lomé, the capital city of Togo in West Africa — a connection to my family’s heritage. Lomé is a coastal city, a meeting point of cultures and trade routes, a place where different influences converge into something distinct. That felt like the right spirit for a studio focused on building things that bring people together.

The “Labs” part is straightforward. We experiment. We prototype. We test ideas and refine them until they feel right. Every product that ships from this studio goes through that process — it’s never just the first draft.

Why an app studio

My background is in systems engineering — designing infrastructure, thinking in terms of reliability and scale, making sure the pieces fit together. That kind of work is deeply satisfying in its own way, but there’s something different about building a product that someone picks up on their phone and uses in their daily life.

I’ve always been drawn to making things. Whether it’s photography, side projects, or late-night prototypes, the pull toward creation has been constant. Lome Labs is what happens when you stop treating that pull as a hobby and start treating it as the work itself.

I wanted to build products that go directly into people’s hands — not dashboards for other engineers, not tools buried behind a corporate login, but apps that real people use to play, connect, and enjoy their day.

What we’re building

We’re starting with Apple platforms because that’s where we see the strongest opportunity to build truly native, polished experiences. SwiftUI, the Messages framework, Game Center — Apple provides incredible tools for developers who commit to the ecosystem, and we’re committing fully.

Our first app is Cut — a classic card game built directly into iMessage. The idea is simple: you should be able to play Spades with your friends without leaving your group chat. No separate app to download and coordinate around. Just open the conversation, start a game, and play.

We’re designing it for the way people actually text — quick rounds you can pick up and put down, smart AI opponents when you need a fourth player, and a clean interface that doesn’t fight with the iMessage experience around it. It’s in active development, and we’ll have more to share soon.

How we build

A few principles guide everything we do at Lome Labs:

Quality over quantity. We’d rather ship one app that’s genuinely great than five that are just okay. Every detail matters — the typography, the haptics, the way the app responds to your input. We don’t cut those corners.

Native over cross-platform. We build with Swift and SwiftUI, using Apple’s frameworks directly. Cross-platform tools have their place, but when you’re building for iOS and iMessage, nothing beats going native. The performance is better, the integration is deeper, and the experience feels like it belongs.

Privacy by default. We collect as little data as possible. For Cut, game data stays on your device. We’re not running analytics on your card games or selling your play history. Your data is yours.

Ship, listen, improve. We believe in getting products into people’s hands and then iterating based on real feedback. Not endless planning cycles. Not waiting for perfection. Ship something solid, learn from how people use it, and make it better.

What’s next

This is the beginning. We have more ideas in the pipeline beyond Cut — more games, more social experiences, more ways to make your Apple devices a little more fun.

If any of this resonates with you, follow along. This blog is where we’ll share updates on what we’re building, what we’re learning, and the occasional deep dive into the craft behind our apps.

We’re just getting started, and there’s a lot more to come.

— Gerald