It's been 8 months of development and there is no MVP yet.

A quick recap we are building Safe Space - an application for storing encrypted photos on iCloud. If 1Password and apple photos had a baby that would be Safe Space. The project should've been quick and simple by purpose, so we could build it while working full-time jobs.

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Building a side project is a difficult task to accomplish. I knew that. I also knew I shouldn't build a side project on a technology I'm not familiar with. It would slow down development and increase the risk of not finishing the project at all.
But none of these things caused us as much of a delay as life itself.
When we started the project with my friend who is a professional iOS dev, it looked simple. I would focus on everything but core swift development like design, back-end, blog posts, and simple UI features. Eventually, I'll build enough expertise, to help with developing more and we'll split 50/50. Sounds simple. And it somewhat worked, just not that good. The year was crazy. My friend switched 3 jobs, get married and get a mortgage. I've moved to another country, survived a couple of intense lockdowns, and barely managed to keep my sanity.
And we are still working on Safe Space through all that and there is a simple reason. We think the project is needed. I need it myself and after dealing with privacy and encryption issues on iOS I'm even more certain about Safe Space than I was at the beginning.
Would it be easier to build something for the web, giving my day job as a full-stack web developer? Of course, it would. But I don't think we would go that far including all the intensity which was happening last year.
I have no motto in building another SAAS tool by myself. There is a ton of awesome SAAS tools. A cohort of entrepreneurs who are open about their journey and revenue and I admire them. Without that inspiration, I would never even started. But I'm not one of them.
Native apps always were my point of interest. I believe in the web, but I also enjoy using simple, single-purpose native apps like iAWritter which I'm using for writing that post, or Things which I use every day for last 4 years.

We are committed to build Safe Space and keep it running forever. It might not bring huge profits. It is exhaustive journey and I do hope it will get easier, but until then, we are launching test flight this month (photos only) let me know if you want to join it there

https://2ufis92j26w.typeform.com/to/JOMif1CO

Would do you think is it a sustainable way to become an indie hacker?

P.S. - the next article about how we made Safe Space secure rewriting it 3 times, is coming this week :)