Daily Skyline

Skyscraper puzzles usually live in books or one-off web toys. There is no shared daily board, so you cannot compare a time with anyone who played the same grid.

I wanted something closer to Wordle for logic: five minutes, one puzzle per day, same clues for everyone. Ads, accounts, and endless puzzle catalogs all fight that habit.

One deterministic 5×5 puzzle per calendar date — same clues, same difficulty, everywhere. The seed is the date, so any two installs agree without a server-side puzzle API.

I shipped it as an iOS app on Expo / React Native: notes, undo, a mistake limit, on-device streaks, an archive of missed days, and optional Game Center leaderboards. Marketing sits on a Next.js site at dailyskyline.muratoncu.com so App Store traffic has a place to land.

No account means you can play immediately, but progress lives on the device — a reinstall can drop a streak. That was intentional: lower friction beat cloud sync for a daily puzzle.

iOS shipped first; Android followed on Google Play in October 2026 with the same date seed. Difficulty ramps through the week instead of letting players pick a puzzle size, so the “shared board” promise stays intact. No ads and no IAP keep the listing honest, and also mean there is no monetization layer to hide behind.

Live on the App Store and Google Play as a five-minute daily habit. No sign-up, no ads, no IAP in the current listing. Ratings and version metadata on the case study come from the live App Store listing, not invented numbers.

A daily product needs a boring constraint more than a feature list. Fixing the board to the calendar date removed a dozen product debates (difficulty pickers, puzzle packs, “random forever” modes).

Expo got me to TestFlight fast; Game Center was enough social proof without building accounts. Porting to Android was mostly store work, since the date seed already kept both platforms on the same board. What I would change next: a clearer first-run that teaches skyscraper rules without a wall of text.