I've been reading your articles for a couple months and had actually been holding off on spamming you about the app I've been working on for over a year as I assumed you probably get that a lot and it's just annoying at this point. When I first started working on Health Check-In around August of 2025, I had no idea just how many people were already developing custom apps until I started exploring some of the Reddit groups like "r/Quantified Self", etc. You're right, though... anyone can write an app now... the difference can really be knowing which direction to take with features/functionality.
And, welp, you can find links to Health Check-In for iPhone and Android on the website: https://healthcheckin.app
I wish you had "spammed" me -- that looks like a cool well-done app!
Good point: "knowing which direction to take" is the hard part, and maybe that's the ultimate value that app makers bring. Sometimes a beginner's biggest problem is knowing where to begin.
Hah, thank you! I've probably spent multiple hundreds of hours on it, even with Claude doing all the coding. A good amount of that time has also been spent on sharing it and asking for feedback, which 90% of people tend to not be interested in... and I can understand that.
And yes, it starts from "I can't find an app that does what I want". In my case, I was frustrated with features from a few different aspects of health tracker apps that I'd been trying and just wanted everything in one place, where nothing was stored outside of my phone and it could feasibly only take me seconds every day to stay engaged.
Idea on Thursday, live on the App Store the following Wednesday is a great data point for how far this has come. Did review push back on anything, like the Bluetooth permission prompt for the H10 or the iCloud storage, or did it go through on the first try? That's usually where first-time submitters get stuck. Also agree on skipping the how-to: describing the problem clearly to the LLM seems to matter more than any recipe.
I've been reading your articles for a couple months and had actually been holding off on spamming you about the app I've been working on for over a year as I assumed you probably get that a lot and it's just annoying at this point. When I first started working on Health Check-In around August of 2025, I had no idea just how many people were already developing custom apps until I started exploring some of the Reddit groups like "r/Quantified Self", etc. You're right, though... anyone can write an app now... the difference can really be knowing which direction to take with features/functionality.
And, welp, you can find links to Health Check-In for iPhone and Android on the website: https://healthcheckin.app
I wish you had "spammed" me -- that looks like a cool well-done app!
Good point: "knowing which direction to take" is the hard part, and maybe that's the ultimate value that app makers bring. Sometimes a beginner's biggest problem is knowing where to begin.
Hah, thank you! I've probably spent multiple hundreds of hours on it, even with Claude doing all the coding. A good amount of that time has also been spent on sharing it and asking for feedback, which 90% of people tend to not be interested in... and I can understand that.
And yes, it starts from "I can't find an app that does what I want". In my case, I was frustrated with features from a few different aspects of health tracker apps that I'd been trying and just wanted everything in one place, where nothing was stored outside of my phone and it could feasibly only take me seconds every day to stay engaged.
Idea on Thursday, live on the App Store the following Wednesday is a great data point for how far this has come. Did review push back on anything, like the Bluetooth permission prompt for the H10 or the iCloud storage, or did it go through on the first try? That's usually where first-time submitters get stuck. Also agree on skipping the how-to: describing the problem clearly to the LLM seems to matter more than any recipe.