Why I Built Mira

I watch a lot of video. Tutorials when I'm learning something, long-form essays with dinner, music while I work, a show in sync with people I don't get to sit next to anymore. Which means I've spent years noticing the same small frictions, over and over, on every screen I own.

The sponsor read I've already heard three times this week. The "coming up in this video" preamble before the video actually starts. Opening a tab to look one thing up and surfacing forty minutes later somewhere else entirely. Knowing a podcast guest said something useful an hour ago and having no way to find the moment short of scrubbing. Pressing play at the same time as someone in another city, counting down over the phone, and still drifting two seconds apart.

None of these is a crisis. That's exactly why they persist — each one is just small enough to tolerate. But they add up to a way of watching that feels noisier and less deliberate than it should, on hardware that is otherwise the best anyone has ever made for watching things.

What I actually wanted

I wanted one calm place to watch. A player — not another everything-app — that treats the video as the point and everything around it as optional. Concretely, that meant:

• Skipping the parts I didn't come for. The SponsorBlock community had already solved this with shared, precise segment timestamps — it just wasn't available in a native app on Apple devices the way it deserved to be.
• Treating a video like a document. If a video has a transcript, I should be able to search it, jump to the exact line, and ask questions about it.
• Watching together without a countdown. A room code, synced playback, and a chat window — the simple version of watching with someone, done properly.
• The same experience on every device. Not a great Mac version with a neglected iPhone port, or the reverse. One app that respects each screen.

I looked for that app. Pieces of it existed in different places — an extension here, a mobile app there — but never together, and never across iPhone, iPad, and Mac at once. So I built it.

How it's built

Mira is an independent app, built by one person on Apple's native frameworks — no third-party SDKs, no trackers, sandboxed the way the Mac App Store expects. Your AI keys, if you choose to add them, stay on your device. The app doesn't ask you to create an account. I'm deliberately boring about this: a video player should be a tool you trust, not a service you're enrolled in.

If any of those small frictions sound like yours, Mira takes about five minutes to set up — it's on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

— the developer of Mira