Nicola Giancecchi
Freelance iOS Engineer, POP Digital Studio
I'm a freelance iOS developer and UX/UI designer with 14 years of experience on Apple platforms, working solo through my own studio based in San Marino. I cover the full product lifecycle - from UX design to native development on the Apple platforms, through to App Store release. Beyond native development, I also work with hybrid tools and web projects.
I've worked on 70+ projects in the past, ranging from large companies like Zalando and Wire to local startups. I'm a four-time Apple WWDC Scholar (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018). I love working at the intersection of engineering and design and owning both sides of a product in.
Taming the Screen Time API: A Survival Guide to FamilyControls and DeviceActivity
Apple's Screen Time APIs let you build digital wellbeing and parental control features, but they're some of the least documented frameworks in the Apple ecosystem. I'll walk through what I learned building a real app on top of them: requesting the Family Controls entitlement, designing around the Device Activity Report and Monitor extensions' brutal sandbox limits, and the bugs and workarounds found. You'll leave knowing which framework to reach for, how to survive the extensions' constraints, and how to design UX that hides what the API can't fix.