Darbuka Companion is live on iOS!
The app I’ve been working on is live on the App Store and already getting downloads!
The idea came from a problem many hand drum players share (myself included): the struggle to find rhythms and keep track of them across notebooks, printed PDFs, and YouTube videos, and have them easily accessible while actually playing.
The app also helps anyone who wants to get started with this beautiful instrument, with over 90 rhythms from across the world, notation, and historical and cultural background for each one.
Similar apps exist, but none had the depth, craft, and context I had in mind. So I started tinkering with Claude Code just to see how far I could take it. A month and a half of planning, building, and iterating later, it’s live.
Under the hood it uses React, Vite, and Capacitor, with RevenueCat for the paywall. All the sounds were recorded on my own darbuka, and the hand position illustrations are from me playing. The drums you see in the app are from my own collection.
Working on this reminded me of afternoons exploring what I could do with my ZX Spectrum as a kid, or the early days of my career playing around with Flash and launching my first website.
What started as a pet project grew alongside my amazement at how far Claude Code could take things, it’s remarkable how much AI can enable when you bring focus and curiosity to it. The joy of seeing it live and people using it makes up for the late nights and early Saturday mornings.
You can find it on the App Store, and Android is coming soon..
I also build a small landing page, you can download it from. there :)
I will write a longer post with the process I followed… but now I’m already thinking about the next one, stay tuned!