Tidelight

The challenge: a great product that couldn’t ship without an app

This app wasn’t just a nice accompaniment to the lamp; it was an integral part of the product. The physical lamp was ready, and the hardware worked. Alex had done the hard, unglamorous work of getting a physical product through electrical safety testing and out the other side.

Building the app wasn’t going to be straightforward, though. Wi-Fi onboarding over Bluetooth can be really tricky across iOS and Android. It needed to pull real tidal data from Alex’s own API and let users find and save their favourite beach. It needed to feel properly native on both platforms, and it needed to clear the App Store process, which has its own compliance requirements headache attached to it!

With no in-house development experience and a startup budget, Alex didn’t need something over-engineered or complicated. He needed something simple, solid, and built to grow and a tech partner who could own the whole thing.

The solution: a Flutter app that just works, on every platform

We built a Flutter app enabling one codebase that works natively on both iOS and Android. No matter the platform, the app does everything a Tidelight customer needs:

1. Sets up the lamp over Bluetooth
2. Let’s you search for your favourite beach
3. Pulls in real tidal data so the lamp knows exactly what to do
4. Shows you a tide graph on the dashboard so you can see what’s coming. 

We also built in account management and a compliant account deletion flow, because Apple won’t approve your app without it.

Then came the submissions. We handled every step of the app store process, both the Apple and Google developer portals, the back-and-forth, and the resubmissions. It’s all part of shipping a consumer app, and we navigated it all, so Tidelight didn’t need to. 

We worked closely with Alex throughout. He tested builds quickly, gave clear feedback, and trusted us to make the right calls.

One of our favourite bits about this project was when a lamp arrived at our office. Having the actual hardware in developers’ hands made a real difference; you can’t properly test a connected product on a screen. Plus, our office is full of surfers, swimmers and beach users, so it came in really handy for lunchtime surfs and after-work dips.

The results: live, growing, and loved by the people using it

The app went live on both the iOS App Store and Google Play in June 2025. Since then, it’s gone through seven major releases, global tide locations have been added well beyond the original UK-only database, and multi-language support is in the works, with French already underway.

By December 2025, 355 people had signed up, and that number keeps on growing.

We’ve had no major outages post-launch, and every critical bug has been resolved within days.

The best kind of results we like to see for any consumer app we build is from the end user. The team at Tidelight shared their own customer reviews with us, and we knew we’d done a great job as they kept mentioning the app.

“It was easy to set up, use the app and link to my local beach.”

“The app is also very intuitive and easy to use.”

“The Tide lamp has always been indicating our chosen tide accurately when we check it.”

We love working with teams like Tidelight; it is exactly the kind of project we started Hiyield for. Teams with real ambition to make something that matters and something really, really cool!