Why does Clawesome have a mobile app?

The first thing we did was look at vendors. Surely someone out there had already solved this problem, right? We talked to companies that make arcade management systems, payment processors, hardware integrators. None of them could do what we wanted. They all had pieces of the puzzle, but nothing that fit our vision of a truly seamless, mobile-first experience.

Most systems were built around the old model: tokens, cards with magnetic stripes, clunky kiosks. We wanted you to walk up to a machine, tap your phone, and play. No tokens. No fumbling. Just instant play. When we described this to vendors, we got a lot of blank stares and "well, that's not really how it works."

So we decided to build it ourselves. Looking back, that was either the best decision we made or the dumbest. Probably both.

Here's something most people don't know: we almost went with a completely different model. Instead of buying credit packages upfront, we considered just charging your card on demand - every time you tap to play, we charge you for that play. No packages, no leftover credits, super clean.

Then we did the math on Square's transaction fees. Turns out, charging $0.50 per play means you're losing a huge chunk to payment processing. It's just not economical. Credit packages let us batch those fees and pass the savings on. So packages it was.

We also made a conscious decision about prizes. Traditional claw arcades often have trade-up systems - you win a small prize, then trade it in along with more wins to get something bigger. We didn't love that model. When you win something at Clawesome, it's yours. We don't want to take wins away from you. Instead, we reward you for playing through our XP system - level up and unlock free prizes just for being part of the community.

We started with iPhone only. Not because we don't like Android, but because focusing on one platform meant we could actually ship something good instead of two mediocre apps. SwiftUI let us move fast and build something that felt native and polished.

The app became the hub for everything. Buy credits, see your balance in real-time, check leaderboards, track your level, find out when your friends are playing. Later we partnered with Hidev Mobile to build the Android version in Flutter, so now everyone's covered.

I've been writing software my whole career. Hardware? Complete mystery. But we needed custom hardware - a device on each machine that could display information, read NFC from phones and cards, communicate with our servers, and actually trigger the machine to play. Nothing like this existed, so I had to learn.

I designed 3D-printed enclosures, figured out how to wire everything together, wrote the embedded software. It was terrifying and exhilarating. There's something different about hardware - when software breaks, you fix a bug. When hardware breaks, you're holding a pile of useless plastic and circuits wondering where you went wrong.

There were moments of genuine despair. I remember the first time we assembled everything together - the enclosure, the display, the NFC reader, all the wiring. I tapped a card and... nothing.

Wouldn't scan. Months of work, and the most basic function didn't work. I wanted to throw the whole thing in the trash. Two weeks before we opened, I was building these units until 2am every night. My wife thought I'd lost my mind. I probably had. She helped me assemble them anyway. There's no manual for "how to build an arcade from scratch," so you just keep going until it works or you collapse. Thankfully, it worked.

NFC seemed simple at first. Tap, read, done. Then reality hit.

First problem: electromagnetic interference. When electricity travels through circuits really fast - like in the motors, lights, power supplies, and even the displays that say tap to play - it creates electromagnetic radiation. That radiation was messing with our NFC readers constantly. We had to learn about ferrite, shielding, antenna placement. At some point I found myself reading about ferrite at midnight, which is not a sentence I ever expected to say out loud. (Don't worry, by the way - this radiation is at frequencies that are completely harmless to people. It's no different than what's happening inside your phone right now.)

Second problem: antenna geometry. We learned this the hard way. Our bigger card tappers - the ones with larger antennas - actually don't work as well as our little ones. Turns out the geometry of the NFC antenna needs to match the geometry of what you're scanning. Cards have small antennas, so our small readers with matching geometry work better. Who knew? Not me. Not until I'd already built a bunch of the big ones.

Third problem - and this one almost broke us. After I built everything, I tried tapping my iPhone to test the NFC reader. Instead of our app handling it, up pops Apple Wallet. Turns out iPhones don't let you use the phone as a static NFC tag like Android does. Apple locks that down. We had to completely rethink how phone taps work at the last minute. That was a stressful week.

When you tap "Play" in the app, you don't want to wait. You want the machine to respond immediately. That meant we needed real-time communication between your phone, our servers, and the machine - all in milliseconds.

Every machine maintains a persistent connection to our backend. When you authorize a play, the message gets pushed down instantly. You're playing before you even lower your phone. Getting that to work reliably, handling network drops, session timeouts, all the edge cases - that was its own adventure.

Not everyone wants to download an app, and that's fine. We built a POS system that runs on tablets at the counter. Staff can sell credits, issue NFC cards, check balances - all without the customer needing to touch their phone. Credits go right onto a card that works instantly on any machine.

People ask me if I'd do it again. Honestly? In the moment, during those 2am sessions two weeks before open, the answer was absolutely not. But now, watching people walk in, tap their phones, and start playing - seeing their faces when they win - yeah. It was worth it.

The control freak in me is satisfied. We own every piece of this experience. When something breaks, we can fix it. When we want to add a feature, we just build it. No waiting on vendors, no compromises, no "that's not how our system works."

Could we have launched faster with off-the-shelf solutions? Definitely. Would it have been Clawesome? No. It would have been another arcade. And we didn't want to build another arcade.

We wanted to build something new. And we did.

Also, I still keep a screwdriver in my backpack. Just in case.