I Built an App for People Who Walk UN Corridors. Here’s What I Learned.
There is a specific kind of frustration that only makes sense if you’ve spent time working inside a large international institution. You show up to a meeting room — let’s say one of the smaller conference rooms in the Palais des Nations in Geneva — and it’s empty. Not cancelled. Moved. An hour ago. The updated information was in the Journal, a Website that definitely wasn’t made for mobile viewing.
I worked as an advisor at the UN for a stretch. I did this more times than I’d like to admit.
To be honest, the frustrating part was never that the information was wrong. The Journal of the United Nations is meticulous. Every meeting, every room, every informal consultation, every duty station — New York, Geneva, Vienna, Nairobi — all of it, in six languages, published daily. The information was all there. It just wasn’t built for the people who actually needed it in the moment. It was built for filing, not for navigating.
At some point I decided to build something about it, mostly out of curiosity rather than any plan to turn it into a product. I had been tinkering with small web projects, and I wanted to try iOS development. I didn’t expect to ship something polished. My original ambition was something like: show the day’s meetings in a list, on a phone, without requiring the person to open a PDF.
However, I should be upfront about how I actually built it. I am not an iOS developer. I have never shipped a Swift app before this. What I had was a clear mental model of what the thing needed to do, and access to Claude, which I used heavily throughout to write and debug the code. There were stretches where I was describing what I wanted in plain language and then working through the output to make it actually function. It was slower than I expected and more satisfying than I expected. I learned things I wouldn’t have learned any other way.
The app is called Envo (envo.tschuebi.com). It reads the UN Journal and surfaces the relevant information — meetings, rooms, times, duty stations — in a clean interface that works on your phone and, importantly, works offline. That last part mattered to me because basement conference rooms and the inside of large UN buildings are not always well-served by mobile signal, and having the schedule disappear at the wrong moment defeats the point. It covers the four main duty stations. Six UN languages. And there’s a Pro version that adds calendar sync, push alerts for when a room or time changes, and a private calendar feed you can subscribe to from whatever calendar app you already use.
The scope crept, in the way these things do when you’re building something you actually care about. “Show today’s meetings” became “sync to my calendar” became “push alerts for changes” became “offline mode” became “and do all of this in Arabic and Chinese.” Each addition made sense when I added it. Together they added up to considerably more than I originally planned.
What I find genuinely enjoyable about building something this specific is the clarity it gives you. The goal is small and real. The problem is small and real. The Journal exists. The information exists. Someone just needed to connect them in a way that fits in a pocket.
I’m not building this with ambitions to scale it to millions of users. In my opinion, that’s part of what makes it interesting to work on. Envo is currently on TestFlight. If you work at the UN, have colleagues who do, or spend time in those buildings in any capacity, I’d love to have you try it — especially if you’re someone who’s ever stood outside an empty conference room wondering where everyone went. You can find the beta at envo.tschuebi.com.
It started as an experiment. I think it became something useful. Those two things aren’t as different as they sound.
Stay safe,
Raffael
