I built 26 PDF and image tools that run entirely on your device

dev.to2026-11-04 00:450 views

I got tired of a very small, very specific kind of annoyance.

You need to do something simple. Shrink a photo so it will actually send. Sort out a PDF before you email it. You find an app, open it, and before it does anything it wants you to create an account. Or it quietly sends your file off to a server somewhere, does the work there, and sends it back.

For a lot of people that's fine. It never sat right with me. These are often the most personal files we have: IDs, contracts, bank statements, photos of our families. And the funny part is that the phone in your hand is more than capable of doing the work by itself. There's no real reason for the file to leave.

So I built Jigwell.

What it is

Jigwell is 26 small tools for PDFs, images, files and text, all in one app. It's on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and there's an Apple Watch app too. Everything runs on your device, and every tool works in Airplane Mode. You'll need iOS 17 or later, or macOS 14 or later on a Mac.

The Watch app keeps things simple with four tools: Focus Timer, QR, Password and UUID. Quick things you'd rather not pull your phone out for. It runs on watchOS 10 or later.

What "private" means here

I want to be precise about this, because "private" gets thrown around a lot.

There's no account. There's no analytics. The app contains no networking code at all, so it has no way to send your files anywhere. The only network traffic comes from Apple itself, when you make a purchase through the App Store.

How it's priced

If you're working on one file at a time, it's free.

Pro is for people who lean on it more. It adds compressing several images at once, your full history, exporting that history, and saved presets so you're not setting the same options every single time.

Building it from Abuja

Jigwell is made by Native Craft Limited, which is a fancy way of saying me. It's a one-person company here in Abuja. Two things I learned along the way:

App Store review keeps you honest. When your whole promise is that nothing leaves the device, you can't be vague. What you say in the listing has to line up exactly with what the app does. The Mac version cleared review the same day I wrote this, and it's live now.

The Watch is its own puzzle. A Watch screen is tiny, and people look at it for a few seconds at most. Putting all 26 tools on it would have made no sense. Picking four, and making each one fast enough to use while you're standing in line, took more thought than I expected.