Case study 05 · consumer iOS app

Days Since

A no-contact companion app: a gentle animal companion holds the streak for you. Built solo from concept to a subscription product on Apple's pipeline.

Role
Concept, design, full build, art direction, launch
Form
Native iOS · widgets · cloud sync · automated release pipeline
Model
3-day full trial, no card → $2.99/mo
Status
TestFlight, App Store launch staged
Days Since companion
47
days since last contact
your companion is proud of you

The design problem

Habit apps guilt-trip. For someone getting over a person, guilt is the failure mode. So the app has a hard design law: no guilt mechanics, ever. The companion never gets sad. Success is the user needing the app less, and the analytics celebrate declining usage instead of engagement-hacking it.

The revenue design

Competitors paywall day one with a card-required "free" trial. Days Since gives three full days with no card, then a $2.99/mo subscription where the day counter itself never locks, only the extras do. Monetization was researched against comparable apps before a line of paywall code was written.

What shipping it required

  • The product: per-person streaks with three parallel timers, home and lock-screen widgets, care rituals, a fake-texting outlet grounded in expressive-writing research, analytics with honest sample-size gating, voice memos, a release ceremony when the goal is reached.
  • The pipeline: fully automated CI that generates the Xcode project, signs, builds and uploads to TestFlight on every push. No Mac on the desk.
  • The art: an AI-assisted art pipeline producing 148 registered, stop-motion-ready assets, processed and installed programmatically so the whole character set can be regenerated in a sitting.
  • Sync and privacy: zero servers. Local-first data with optional iCloud sync, so there is no account, nothing to breach, and the privacy label is honest.
Why this matters for client work: apps and funnels fail in the unglamorous last 10%: signing, review rules, edge cases, refund flows. I have been through that mile solo and it shows up in how I scope estimates.
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