Who is behind this
PPVNX is run by Lichen Zhu, a solo developer. There is no team, no investors and no outsourcing: the same person writes the code, draws the icons, records the store screenshots, files the review appeals, racks the hardware and answers the support email. When you write to [email protected], that is who replies.
That constraint shapes everything here. A one-person studio cannot ship twenty mediocre products, so it ships a small number and keeps them running for years. It also cannot absorb a surprise cloud invoice, which is why the whole fleet runs on hardware that was bought once.
What we build
Small, self-contained tools and games — each one solving a problem the author actually had, then finished properly and shipped to real stores rather than left as a demo. Most run on the web, iOS and Android from a single codebase.
- TrendWatcher — turns live signals from Google Trends, Hacker News, Product Hunt, GitHub and arXiv into scored, buildable app ideas.
- HypercasualGames — the same engine pointed at what is charting in mobile games, each idea with a core mechanic attached.
- PBudget — a personal budget ledger that links your bank through Plaid and reconciles itself every month.
- ACMap — a free, community-built map of public air-conditioned and cooling spaces, for people without AC at home.
- Books of Infinite Answers — a digital oracle: hold the book, ask a question, reveal an answer.
- Tile.IO — 8192 — 2048 with gravity, a falling-tile merge puzzle on the App Store and Google Play.
- HDive and MinesweeperOnline — web-first experiments that stayed useful enough to keep online.
How it runs
Every app on this site is served from a home Kubernetes (k3s) cluster fronted by Cloudflare — no AWS, no Vercel, no managed database, no monthly platform bill. The machines sit in an apartment on one power circuit and one internet line, and the architecture is built around that honestly: Cloudflare’s edge absorbs the traffic and caching, redundancy inside the cluster makes routine hardware failures boring, and every deploy is scripted so recovery is a rerun rather than a memory test.
The full write-up — the stack, the failure modes and the actual economics — is in how it’s built.
How we handle your data
The apps collect as little as they can get away with, and the policies say exactly what each one touches rather than one blanket document: the app privacy policy covers the networked apps that hold an account or a bank link, and the games policy covers the offline games, which never see a login. Where an app holds an account, you can delete it from inside the app — not by emailing us and waiting.
Getting in touch
Email is the only channel, and it reaches a person: [email protected]. Bug reports, billing questions, data requests and feature ideas all go to the same place, normally answered within two business days. The support page lists what to include so the first reply is a useful one.