If there’s an app you’ve been wanting to love but are continually frustrated by persistent bugs or inadequate features, one surefire way to resolve the issue is to design your own.

Sacramento-based app developer and TV fan Maximilian Litteral was a user of a product called ITV Shows, an offering that lets viewers stay on top of what’s airing when and where, and track their own viewing prowess.

“It’s good to know when stuff starts and what is starting, especially in the fall when there’s so much,” said Litteral. “And sometimes it changes, so it’s good to get that update.”

The problem was, Litteral found ITV Shows buggy, and when he tried to sync it with his account on Trakt.tv, a platform that monitors what you watch on your home media center, “it kind of messed everything up. So I was like, ‘I’m done with this app,’ and I didn’t see anything else that really worked.”

So Litteral created what he wanted to see: Television Time, an app now available for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch that addresses the addictive activity of personal TV scheduling and management with reliable syncing to both Trakt and iCloud, as well as “cleaner design,” said Litteral.

Aiming to clean up the clutter, he limited information on the main screen to a show’s title, time of airing and poster.

“I just wanted to see those important things,” he continued. “I wanted to know the important stuff about the shows quickly.” Meanwhile, having Television Time on the Apple Watch, he said, lets him “check my shows from everywhere, and I really like that.”

When Litteral was all of 14 years old, he designed an iOS app called SMS Signature, which lets users, as the name suggests, add signatures to texts a la email messages. He had gotten into the “jailbreak stuff” on his iPhone and “wanted to make my own tweaks and hack the phone, and apps just seemed easier.” At 99 cents a pop, SMS Signature was a success – by however a 14-year-old measures success – and Litteral was hooked.

He’s now 19 and in his second year at Folsom Lake College. Television Time is one of three apps he has released for iOS. He had intended to launch it months ago, but after attending the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, he received design tips and advice for getting featured on the App Store, including adding iOS 9 compatability, that compelled him to push back the release date. Litteral is a one-man operation and can release his apps whenever he wants, but you have to act fast in the competitive world of television tracking apps to stay relevant. The number of apps that use Trakt.tv’s API on iPhone alone is already more than a dozen.

Television Time came out in late September and quickly rose to No.17 in the Entertainment section in terms of downloads. It has yet to be one of Apple’s featured apps, but it could still become one as the Fall season continues to gear up and Apple expands the number of TV-related apps it showcases. Either way, Litteral isn’t standing idly by. He’s already planning updates to the app including slicker Apple Watch functionality and a version geared toward movie buffs.

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