Notes on building a private, on-device movie recommender: recommendation deep dives, the development process, and reviews.
Why blending contrasting favorite movies into a single average breaks movie recommendations, and how WhatNext. lets distinct viewing moods coexist.
A personal review of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026), paired with four grand mythic and adventure epic recommendations from WhatNext.
A personal review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026), paired with four high-stakes action recommendations from WhatNext.'s recommendation engine.
A personal review of Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender (2026), paired with four animated martial arts and fantasy recommendations from WhatNext.
Four gritty neo-noir thrillers like Nightcrawler, selected by WhatNext.'s engine: Dirty Pretty Things, The Grifters, To Live and Die in L.A., and Following.
A personal review of Coyote vs Acme (2026), paired with four animated and courtroom comedy recommendations from WhatNext.'s recommendation engine.
Four body horror movies like The Substance, picked by WhatNext.'s recommendation engine: Re-Animator, Birth/rebirth, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and The Brood.
Four movies like The Truman Show, selected by WhatNext.'s recommendation engine for artificial worlds, staged reality, and identity: S1m0ne, Paper Moon, American Fiction, and Lars and the Real Girl.
The curation mistake I caught the same day I made it: dropping the highest-scoring pick in one of WhatNext.'s TikTok recommendation posts to protect a theme, and the new rule that fixes it.
WhatNext.'s Profile radar chart draws its axes from your own top genres, not a fixed list, and its named taste archetype is a best-fit label chosen from 14 weighted rules against your top three genres and recurring mood tags.
A personal review of the 2026 family-survival thriller The End of Oak Street, plus four similar survival-movie recommendations from WhatNext.'s recommendation engine.
Why I voluntarily pulled an Apple-approved App Store build to rewrite WhatNext.'s recommendation math from scratch with Bayesian shrinkage priors.
Four psychological and social horror movies like Get Out, selected by WhatNext.'s recommendation engine for subverted safety and paranoia: Us, The Invitation, Speak No Evil, and Presence.
How WhatNext. calculates every movie recommendation entirely on your phone, with no server and no data collection, and the small engineering trick that keeps it instant.
Four movies like Interstellar, picked by WhatNext.'s recommendation engine for the same scale, awe, and emotional core: Arrival, Gravity, Ad Astra, and Contact.
How WhatNext. actually got built: the app that came before it, the Apple review it walked away from on purpose, the one it got rejected from, and 727 commits in between.
WhatNext., a private movie recommendation app that learns your taste entirely on your device, launched on the App Store on August 14, 2026.