The person behind What to Watch
What to Watch is a free movie and TV guide for iOS and Android, built and run by one independent developer, Max Ishchenko. It has been on the Apple and Play Store since 2017.
Who makes the app
I'm Max Ishchenko, a mobile developer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. I've been working on What to Watch since 2016, and today I build and maintain the iOS and Android apps and the API myself.
You can find me on LinkedIn.
Why I built it
I love films and series where I can't tell what will happen next, and I wanted one place to collect them.
The chance to build it came in 2016, when I broke my leg and spent a long time at home. I was working as a Xamarin Android developer with MvvmCross, and I wanted to learn iOS and cover all of mobile development. At a job you do what the work needs, not always what interests you most, so this project became my way to learn.
How the app has changed
| When | Version | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | v.0 | I started building the iOS and Android apps with Xamarin and MvvmCross. |
| 2017 | v.1 | We went live, with a friend helping on the Java API and MongoDB. Maintaining the API and keeping the data updated brought plenty of trouble. |
| 2021 | v.2 | Xamarin and MvvmCross had become hard to support and develop, so I rewrote the whole app in Flutter in two months. Coming from C#, moving to Dart was easy. |
| 2024 | v.2.5 | I wanted to learn backend development and built my first API myself with Dart Frog. |
| 2026 | v.3 | I redesigned the mobile app and API using Claude Code from Anthropic in one month. |
How I use AI
Claude Code removed the headache of implementing everything by hand. It helped adjust the whole flow and improve performance, while I control the result. Without AI, v.3 would have taken a huge amount of time. Now I can handle everything on my own. To me, that is new reality of software development: one person responsible for everything. Thank you, Anthropic, for this change.
Why v.3 matters to me
There are plenty of similar apps today, but it wasn't like that when I started. What to Watch was always a pet project, not an enterprise product. I never paid for advertising because I thought a good app would get downloads without it. That was my mistake: without paid promotion, an app is hard to find.
v.3 is my new attempt to prove to myself that all this work was not for nothing.
Last updated: November 2026