Habit Planet

Purpose

A girl said "how hard would it be to make an app that lets you record daily video reflections and track your streaks?" So I built it in two weeks and deployed it as Habit Planet. The motivation was part showing off, part genuine curiosity about the problem, and part the eternal developer response to "how hard would it be?" — which is always "let me find out."

Stack

What I Learned

• Two weeks from concept to App Store is achievable when the scope is locked: record a video (AVFoundation camera capture), save it locally (CoreData + file system), display a calendar of recordings (streak visualization), track consecutive days (simple date arithmetic). No backend. No auth. No social features. Just: record, save, streak. The tight scope is what made the timeline possible.
• Daily video recording as a habit-tracking mechanism is more powerful than checkboxes because video is visceral. You can not fake a video the way you can check a box. The video captures your face, your energy, your words on that specific day. Over time, scrolling through a month of daily videos is a mirror that shows you who you were being, not just what you were doing.
• Streak mechanics (1 day, 7 days, 30 days, 100 days) are the simplest gamification that works. The math is trivial: compare today's date to the last recording date. If it is exactly one day later, increment the streak. If it is more than one day, reset to 1. But the emotional weight of a 47-day streak about to break is disproportionate to the engineering effort. Streaks work because losing progress feels worse than gaining progress (loss aversion).
• Building something for a specific person — not a market, not a persona, a real human who asked for it — produces the fastest, most focused development. Every feature decision was easy: "would she use this?" Yes or no. No product debates, no market research, no competitor analysis. Just one user with one need. The clarity was freeing.

Key Insights

• "How hard would it be?" is the most dangerous question someone can ask a developer. The honest answer is always "harder than you think but I will do it anyway." The question is flattering — it implies you can build anything. The answer is committing — once you say "let me find out," you are building it. Two weeks later you have an app on the App Store and a conversation topic that outlived the relationship.
• The app outlasting the relationship is a specific instance of a general truth: software outlives the context that created it. Habit Planet exists on the App Store independent of the conversation that sparked it. Other people can download it. The motivation was personal. The artifact is public. This is true of most software — the reason you built it fades, but the thing you built persists.
• Two-week build timelines are possible when you eliminate everything that is not the core. No backend (local storage only), no auth (it is your phone), no social (no sharing, no friends list), no analytics (no tracking code). Each of these "missing" features represents weeks of work that would have pushed the timeline from 2 weeks to 2 months. Shipping fast means saying no to everything except the one thing that matters.
• Habit Planet is one of the few projects in this blog that was built for someone else and actually shipped. Chrome Save Tabs, Video Speed Controller, Bereshit — those were for me. Array Mobile — for the school. Habit Planet — for a specific person. The pattern: apps built for one real human ship faster and better than apps built for an imagined market. Find your one user. Build for them.