Independent app studio · Seoul, South Korea

Starfathom

Two ends of one scale.

Logarithmic, in metres. The studio sits at neither end.

We make small mobile apps and publish them ourselves. Not one category, on purpose.

The studio

Starfathom is the publishing brand of STEFANCHO LABS, a one-person studio in South Korea. We design, build, and ship apps for iOS and Android, and we release them under our own name rather than through a client or an agency.

The name takes the two ends of that scale and puts them in one word. Neither is a market we work in. They are the size of thing the studio likes to think about, and they are why the index below has a passport-photo tool next to a cold-water log next to a stock app. What those share is not a category. It is that each does one thing a person actually needs on a given day, and has to be worth opening again tomorrow.

Everything is made in-house. We write the code, produce the store assets, run the release pipeline, and answer the support mail ourselves. That is also why this site is short.

Index — in order of release

Internal tools

Starfathom Ads Manager is an internal command-line tool and reporting dashboard, currently in development, that we are building to advertise the apps above. It uses the Google Ads API against our own Google Ads account, under our own manager account, and against nothing else.

The apps earn through in-app advertising and in-app purchases, and we buy installs for them ourselves. Running those campaigns by hand in the Google Ads web interface costs more clicking with every app we release, which is the whole reason for the tool.

Once API access is approved, it will create and update App install campaigns and their daily budgets, manage ad groups and the text, image, and video assets those ads use, apply operator-confirmed changes to supported settings such as target CPA, language, and location, and pull performance reports into an internal dashboard for cost-per-install and retention analysis. Expected volume is low — on the order of hundreds of operations a day. Until then it holds no production campaign data.

It will sign in with a Google Account we own and use the API to read and write campaign settings, budgets, ad assets, and aggregate performance figures on that one advertiser account. Credentials stay in private local configuration, reporting data is cached locally only for our own campaign analysis, and none of it is sold, shared with third parties, or used to train machine-learning models. The tool requests no access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, or contacts. Anything received from Google APIs is handled under the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements, and the full statement is in our privacy policy.

It is internal only. The studio is one person, so the tool has one operator and no external users, and there is nothing here to sign up for. We will not distribute, sell, or license it, and we will not manage Google Ads accounts on behalf of anyone else.

Contact

Support, press, and partnership enquiries: support@starfathom.com. We read every message and normally reply within two business days.

Privacy

We do not collect personal information through this website. Each app has its own policy — see the Starfathom privacy policy for how our apps handle data and for links to the per-app policies.