The studio

DynShift is an independent software studio. It makes small, focused tools, publishes most of them as open source, and does not call one finished until it has been measured doing the job it was built for.

What it makes

Two kinds of thing so far. Products that a person installs and uses, of which PhonePad is the first to reach a public release. And developer libraries: Layr for React, and a set of Flutter packages on pub.dev, each solving one problem that came up while building apps.

Software is the starting point, not the boundary. The intention is to grow from tools into games, and further out into hardware. Each new project appears on this site when it ships, not when it is announced.

How it works

One thing at a time. A project is worked on until it is done, then it is released, then the next one starts. There is no portfolio of half-built ideas competing for attention, because a tool that is nearly finished is not useful to anyone.

Finished has a definition. A tool leaves the studio when three things are true:

• It does the whole job it set out to do. PhonePad, for example, shipped with game rumble reaching the phone, because a controller that cannot rumble is not the controller it claimed to be.
• It has been measured, not assumed to work. The latency, packet rate and loss figures on PhonePad's site each come from a recorded run on real hardware, with the method written down next to the result. Where something was not measured, the documentation says so.
• It reads well enough that somebody else could maintain it. Comments explain why, not what; the failures that shaped a design are recorded in the code that fixed them.

That last point is why so much of the work is public. Source that will be read by strangers is written more carefully than source that will not.

Open source, and which licence

Products are published under the GNU GPL-3.0. Anyone can read, build, modify and redistribute them, and any derivative must stay open on the same terms. PhonePad is GPL-3.0 and, as its own site says, the controller is not going behind a paywall.

Libraries are published under the MIT licence, because a library is only useful if it can be used inside anything, including closed software. Layr and all four Flutter packages are MIT.

Public code lives under MNBLabs on GitHub, which is the studio's organisation account. Issues, discussions and pull requests are open on every public repository, and contributions arrive there.

Names

DynShift and PhonePad are unregistered trademarks of DynShift. Neither is registered anywhere, and the sites do not pretend otherwise. Product names belonging to other companies (Xbox, Windows, Flutter, React) are their owners' marks and are used only to say what a tool works with.

Who

DynShift is run by its founder, Nishan Bhuinya, who designs and builds the products, writes the documentation and answers the issues. The studio is on Instagram as @dynshift.

Money

Nothing DynShift has released so far costs anything, and the free versions are the products, not demos of them. Anyone who found a tool useful can help pay for the time behind it, through GitHub Sponsors or Ko-fi. If paid extras ever appear they will be additions, never a tax on what already works.

Contact

For anything about a specific project, its GitHub repository is the fastest route: bugs as issues, questions and ideas as discussions. For everything else, official@dynshift.com.