My app journey: 7 months later

• Posted on: July 25, 2025

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So, remember this?

Now let’s try to go back to my app.

Yeah… I got COVID. Badly. For a month. Literally. Bedrest, breathing issues, fever, the disgusting flu bits, all of it. Which meant my focus rapidly shifted to “don’t die” for about 4 weeks. So… no app for month 6.

Month 7 I was overwhelmingly frustrated and overwhelmed. Life stress, work stress, it all came at once upon my recovery, so I couldn't really progress much with the app. I even considered abandoning Swift completely and using React Native, so I feel more at home and can get things done quicker. But alas, no RN for Apple Watch, so gotta stick with Swift if I want AW functionality.

Then I had a moment of brilliance: instead of making my app already, make a smaller app. A glorified shortcut in SwiftUI. Then I can move (hopefully) faster and not be so frustrated by a million things I don't know. I can do a "single feature" thing, get a sense for the language and the building structure... something I use every day. A water log app! To measure how much water I drank in 1 day. I have a shortcut for that because the apps I use all involve too many "clicks" to log what I want. This is great. It's small, it's useful, I can do it. I'd have to use Apple's HealthKit API, so that ought to tell me a bit about their SDKs and their docs. Sounds great!

So I went to my wife to brag about my brilliant idea. "Love", I started, "I got it! I'll start by building a smaller, simpler app to learn the basics. Then I'll build what I actually want. Cool, huh?". My wife replied: "Oh? How else were you doing it before? I'd have thought it was obvious to start with something easy". 😆