It all started with a simple, shared annoyance. I was sharing a link with a friend and noticed the URL was a mile long—a messy, unreadable wall of text filled with utm_ and fbclid tracking garbage. It felt sloppy and a bit invasive. As a developer, my first thought was, „I can fix this.“
That thought was the seed for what would eventually become my second App Store app, Trackless Links. But it certainly didn’t start out that way.
The „Ugly But It Works“ Prototype
Initially, this was a project just for me. I hacked together a barebones Safari extension. The „UI“ was non-existent, and the code was probably held together with digital duct tape, but it did one thing perfectly: it stripped tracking parameters from any URL I copied. My links were clean, and I was happy. For a while, that was the end of the story.
The Inevitable Feature Creep
But as I used my little tool, I kept running into other web annoyances. The „what if“ ideas started piling up.
First, I got frustrated trying to find an old version of a news article that I knew had been edited. I thought, „What if I could instantly check any link on the Wayback Machine before opening it?“ So, the one-click Web Archive lookup was born. It quickly became my favorite feature, perfect for digital archaeology or getting past the occasional soft paywall.
Soon after, I was annoyed by modern Reddit’s UI. The thought struck me: „Why can’t I just force old.reddit.com for every Reddit link?“ That led me down the rabbit hole of building a full redirect engine. I wanted it to be powerful enough for any scenario, so I added support for everything from simple text matching to complex regular expressions.
Finally, I started a list of all the little things that drive me crazy about modern websites—sites that disable copy-paste, those infuriating „Are you sure you want to leave?“ pop-ups, and forced new tabs. That list became the „Browser Tweaks“ section, a collection of toggles to fix the web’s most common frustrations.
From Functional to Something I’m Proud Of
After a few months, I had this powerful, multi-faceted engine that was still incredibly ugly. I showed it to a few friends, and to my surprise, they actually wanted to use it.
I couldn’t possibly share it in its current state. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right.
So I decided to rebuild the entire app from the ground up in SwiftUI. I spent the next couple of months obsessing over every detail. I designed custom icons for each section, built a clean and intuitive interface for managing complex filter and redirect rules, and wrote helpful little guides right into the app—like the modals that explain what tracking parameters are or how to use regular expressions. I probably spent more time on the UI than the original logic, but I wanted to create an experience that was as clean and respectful as the URLs it produces.
The Result: Trackless Links
The result of this journey is Trackless Links, a comprehensive toolkit to take back some control over your browsing experience. It’s the app I always wanted for myself, combining three powerful tools in one:
- Filters: Automatically strips tracking parameters from URLs.
- Redirects: Lets you create custom rules to rewrite URLs on the fly.
- Tweaks: A collection of fixes for common web annoyances.
To celebrate finally getting this thing out the door, the app is completely free this entire weekend.
You can find it on the App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trackless-links/id6749830894?platform=iphone
If you end up trying it and find it useful, an App Store review would mean the world to me. Of course, I’d also love to hear any and all feedback you might have. It’s these little ideas and annoyances that helped build the app in the first place.
