CineRank: the app born from a "which one do you prefer?"

No but seriously, which one do you prefer?

That is the question that keeps coming back. After a film, between two films, late in the evening when the two of you are rebuilding cinema from scratch. And every time, the same dead end: you rate, you hesitate, you say “both are good” — and you get nowhere.

That is where CineRank came from. Not from market research. Not from a strategic pivot. From a real frustration, lived on a sofa, with my wife.

A rating settles nothing. A duel does.

The trouble with classic film apps is that they ask you to rate. Four stars, eight out of ten, a thumbs up. Fine. But if Parasite and Mulholland Drive both sit at 8/10 in your head — which one is ahead of the other?

A rating does not answer that. It flattens everything.

The idea behind CineRank is to force the choice: film against film, one duel at a time. It is uncomfortable sometimes. You hesitate. You change your mind. But in the end a real ranking emerges — yours, not one produced by an algorithm or a review aggregator.

First app. Two weeks. SwiftUI.

I come from the web. Several years of web design behind me — and zero iOS apps to my name when I started CineRank.

The idea lived in my head for a few months first. I turned it over in every direction without opening Xcode. Then one day I jumped. SwiftUI, learning in real time, evenings and weekends stolen from around a day job. The MVP was done in two weeks.

My wife — who had unknowingly planted the seed for all of it — became my first beta tester. A role she took very seriously, believe me.

Building in public, iterating relentlessly

Version 1.0 shipped on 11 July 2025. Since then the updates have kept coming at a pace even I would have struggled to predict at the start.

Viewing notes, monthly themed lists, a random pick from the watchlist for the evenings when nobody can decide — every feature came from a real need, often raised by users. In January 2026 the internal architecture was rebuilt from scratch to hold up over the long term. In May 2026, CineRank landed on iPad.

It is a permanent building site.

I did not want to subscribe to anything any more

At launch, CineRank offered a premium subscription. Classic. Logical, even.

Then I took a step back and looked at my own habits. Subscriptions piling up, automatic renewals you forget about, the fatigue of all of it — I was paying for it myself every month. How could I offer users a model that no longer even tempted me to buy?

In April 2026 came the turn: CineRank Premium became a one-off purchase at €9.99. Forever. No renewal, no surprises. One payment, lifetime access.

It was not a marketing decision. It was a consumer’s decision.

How building my own ranking pulled me away from critics’ scores

Here is something I had not anticipated: using CineRank revealed my actual taste.

My 2025 top surprised me. Mickey 17, The Long Walk, The Life of Chuck — not the critics’ darlings, far from it. But they are the films that gave me the most pleasure, and CineRank put it in black and white.

By building my own ranking, disconnected from Allociné or Letterboxd scores, I stopped justifying myself. I owned it. It sounds silly to say, but the app taught me to trust my own taste.

Maybe that is CineRank’s real promise.

What’s next? Years of themed lists.

CineRank is not a finished project — and that is not the intention.

Themed lists are the through line: every month a new theme, a new excuse to re-rank, rediscover, argue. “The best science-fiction films”, “Cult French comedies”, “Films to see before you turn 30” — all of them reasons to open the app again and ask the question that never gets old:

No but seriously, which one do you prefer?

CineRank is available free on the App Store, for iPhone and iPad. Premium — archives, advanced statistics, themed lists, light mode — is a one-off purchase at €9.99.