I built Yore to keep one log of everything I watch, read, and play

My latest app is Yore, a local-first iPhone app that keeps a single log, library, and diary for everything you watch, read, play, and listen to.

I built it because my media life was scattered across half a dozen apps. Movies in one place, books in another, a games backlog somewhere else, and a music history I never actually looked at. I wanted one library: one honest record of what I have actually finished, what I am in the middle of, and what I want to get to.

Yore was built with heavy AI assistance. I'll dig into what that meant near the end.

Why I built it

Most trackers are built for exactly one kind of media. A film app does not know about your manga. A book app has no idea you also play board games. So you end up with a shelf per format and no single place that answers a simple question: what have I been into lately?

Yore is my answer to that. It treats movies, TV, anime, books, manga, games, music, podcasts, board games, and comics as one library, while still respecting that each of those has its own details worth tracking.

What it is

Yore is a personal media library across formats. For each item you can:

• add it manually or import metadata from public services
• track status, ratings, dates, progress, notes, and category-specific fields
• log progress and completions over time
• keep diary entries connected to a specific item when it is worth remembering
• group related things into franchises and collections

The diary is the point

The part I care about most is the diary. A rating tells you what you thought of something; a diary entry tells you what was going on when you experienced it.

Yore lets you attach entries to a specific item, so over time your library stops being a spreadsheet of scores and starts being an actual record: the game you finished on a long flight, the book you read during a hard month, the show you and someone else watched together.

Metadata without accounts or API keys

I did not want Yore to depend on a paid metadata provider or force anyone to manage API keys, so it pulls from public sources that work without keys:

• Movies and games: Wikidata
• TV shows: TVmaze
• Anime and manga: Jikan (MyAnimeList data)
• Books: Open Library
• Music: the iTunes Search API

You get covers, descriptions, release years, genres, and format-specific details with a search instead of manual data entry, but you can always add or edit things by hand.

Built around privacy

Yore is local-first by design. The local SQLite database on your device is the source of truth. There is no required account, and your library stays with you, syncing through iCloud when available.

The tech, and building it with AI

Yore is an Expo Router app with a local SQLite database, backed by those no-key public metadata sources.

I leaned on AI coding tools heavily, for the Expo Router scaffolding, the metadata adapters for each service, and a lot of the data layer. What I did not delegate was the shape of the thing: treating every format as one library, making the diary a first-class feature, and keeping it local-first. AI made it realistic to ship an app that spans ten media types as a solo side project. It did not decide what the app should feel like. I did, by using it.

Ten media types as a solo project, in spare time, without AI: that just wasn't happening.

Availability

Yore is available on iPhone:

• yore.montalesi.dev

If you have ever wanted one place for your whole media life instead of ten, that is exactly what I built it for.