Hi, I’m Gernot

Gernot Poetsch in a cap, glasses and a black T-shirt, smiling, on a wooden bench in front of an old stone wall

I make apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac. nxtbgthng is my company. I design and build the apps, answer the support email, and write the journal.

The apps are paid for by the people who use them: no ads, no data business, no venture capital. So the people I work for are the people who use them.

Next to my own apps, I take on client work. I take apps from idea to App Store, help companies hire their iOS team, and help teams with architecture and strategy.

A bit of history

My father worked at IBM, so we always had a PC at home. I remember using one to play Frogger before they had hard drives. I started programming with my mom’s Turbo Pascal book. Of course I went on to study media and computer science (Medieninformatik) at TU Dresden.

Before nxtbgthng I was a freelance developer: first for the Mac, with Objective-C and Cocoa, before there was an iPhone, then for iOS. I’ve been a WWDC regular since 2005. In 2009 I released Concerts, an iPhone app that showed all of today’s concerts in your city, from Last.fm.

In 2010 I founded nxtbgthng in Berlin with two co-founders. It started as an agency, with SoundCloud as its first client, and early on our desks were in SoundCloud’s office. The iPhone was three years old and the iPad had just come out, and more clients followed: the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall, Trivago, Red Bull, Mercedes-Benz, Carhartt and many more.

The nxtbgthng logo

At first glance, the logo looks like Morse code. Look again and it’s a swipe, a pinch and a tap, the three gestures of a touch screen. Together they spell the name: next, big, thing.

Apps of its own came early, next to the client work. The Irony Detector, in 2010, was a fun design experiment with signalfeuer. Screenfeeder, made with Edenspiekermann in 2012, showed your social feeds one post at a time on the iPhone and iPad, and later on the Apple TV.

In 2015 the agency got a name of its own, Evenly, and carried on as a full-scale mobile agency, while nxtbgthng became smaller and more focused. In 2019 came Wallflower, a HomeKit dashboard for the iPad on the wall, made for the old iPads that would otherwise sit in a drawer. Wallflower 3 came out in 2026, rebuilt from the ground up, and with it I put my own apps first. You Get A Code! followed, which started as a tool I built for myself.

Made in Berlin

nxtbgthng is a German company, at home in Berlin, and that’s where the apps are made. My apps don’t track you and don’t phone home. What you make in them stays on your devices and in your own iCloud.

Say hello

Write to me at hello@nxtbgthng.com, or follow nxtbgthng on Mastodon, Bluesky or X. My personal site is poetsch.org.