We Just Shipped It

It's just past midnight and I've finally pressed the button. Goban3D v1.0 has been submitted for App Store Review. Both iOS and Mac. I'm staring at the words "Waiting for Review" and trying to process that this is actually happening.

What We're Shipping

• A 3D Go board rendered in RealityKit, with a clean 2D mode when you need it
• Play against KataGo, one of the strongest Go AIs in the world, running locally on your device
• 9×9, 13×13, and 19×19 boards
• Full VoiceOver support — a blind player can play a complete game of Go
• Voice Control, Dynamic Type, Reduce Motion, high contrast mode, and every other accessibility feature Apple offers
• 13 languages
• iPhone, iPad, and Mac

No other Go app on the App Store declares any accessibility features. Goban3D has 100% coverage across all seven categories. That matters to me.

How I Got Here

I'm a self-taught developer from Exeter. I first played Go twenty years ago at Kingston University — my roommate and I pulled a piece of wood from a skip, drew the grid with a ruler, and used glass stones from an arts and crafts shop that cost about three pounds.

As a computer science student, I immediately understood why Go mattered. Here was a game with breathtakingly simple rules — a 19×19 grid, black and white stones, place one per turn — and yet it was completely beyond the reach of the world's most powerful computers. I knew this game was important to the science of computing, and I followed that intuition for the next twenty years.

I followed it all the way to Japan as a young man, where I spent two weeks visiting Go salons and sitting across the board from local players. I lost every single match. The salons were thick with cigarette smoke — almost impossible to breathe through a full game — and the players were almost exclusively elderly.

But what struck me most was the disconnect. Here was Japan — a country at the forefront of technology — and yet Go seemed to exist only in these smoky rooms for retirees. Nobody was connecting the game to computing. Nobody was making it accessible to a new generation.

Then AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol and proved my intuition right. The explosion of artificial intelligence that followed — including the very tools I used to build this app — only reinforced what I'd felt since university: Go sits at the intersection of human creativity and machine intelligence. It always has.

Which is why I'm genuinely shocked that nobody beat me to it. There is no fully accessible Go app on the App Store. There's barely a decent one at all. A few years ago, between careers, I decided to fix that.

I taught myself Swift and started building. I had no idea what I was getting into. I used Claude Code as my development partner — I want to be upfront about that. The AI wrote a lot of the code. But the vision, the design decisions, the stubbornness about accessibility — that's all me. I've been playing at my local Exeter club for fifteen years. I care about this game and what it represents.

Two years later, here we are.

What's Next

This is a foundation, not a finish line. Game Center multiplayer, more languages, an SGF editor, AR support, VisionOS, and some ideas that are frankly a bit mad — like playing Go on a torus. But first, let's get through review.

The app is free. If you've been curious about Go, now's a good time to try it. And if you're already a player, I hope this is the app you've been waiting for.

Making Go accessible to all.