OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
mendelgreenberg.com
mendelgreenberg.com
That was where their process was breaking down - When did we buy this? How much was it? The sort of things that are semi-difficult to keep track of when you're going to A LOT of estate sales and then basically need to enter all the stuff into a spreadsheet when you get home.
So the concept was - take pics and enter simple data as you're out and about and then export the data when you get home.
I ended up going way down some deep rabbit holes because I didn't want to host any data (my goal was to actual release the app and hosting people's shopping trips wasn't something I wanted to take on).
So it's all local storage and for sharing between family members I ended up embedding the data in a pdf that you can send in a text and then import - so if x people are at the same sale they can all add to the same "trip" at the same time and then combine the trip when they're all finished shopping.
So image and data optimization were big concerns since it's all on your phone until you export it/delete the trip.
I was a fun process until it wasn't :P
I did end up getting to 1.0 and shipping to the app store, which was really my goal -> make an app and go all the way through the process. So in that way it was a success.
I guess I'll be around answering questions and comments as I see them. Thanks for reading and responding.
I hadn't seen you mention OBD in this article, which is built in to most cars from the past 25 years.
If your shared car has it, you could put one of those Bluetooth LE readers in the port, and have copies of your app connect to the BLE signal on "vehicle return" to calculate milegae driven and maybe more, depending on what the car reports!
Might be worth playing around with, either way congrats on your cool thing
Sounds like Flutter was a good technology choice too, given its flexibility across platforms. As a designer, I know how frustrating it can be that the Google and Apple interface guidelines aren't too prescriptive but patterns vary so much across domains, that it's better to do what you did and evaluate what others do to solve similar problems. Great work!
Personally I find that it's not using Liquid Glass an advantage, at least I don't need to worry about contrasts.
Regarding automatic tracking tho, the easiest option is Bluetooth based, the app knows the identity of the car, when the phone connects, it knows you're probably starting a trip. And the same goes for connected car APIs, those can much easier take the place of an OBD-II reader.
Then at the end of the month debit each account that used negative gas.
The only thing this misses is encouraging fill-up before empty, but it could give notice when the tank is below ¼ before a trip
We all start pet projects with the tools we know, to learn new tools along the way. Sometimes you have a nail and the hammer is the right tool for the job. However, why use just the hammer when you can just download the whole Snap On tool inventory for the same price, in both metric and weird American units?
From your write up, I felt that the frameworks were not helping. A HTML file served as a PWA would provide everything needed, without the need to go through the hoops of app stores and debugging with those fancy AI things. To open the page an NFC sticker in the car could work.
What I am saying is 'Keep It Simple'. Oh, and get a bicycle! Most of the world uses 'active travel' for most journeys, only in America is 'active travel' effectively banned by zoning laws and whatnot. Maybe v2 of the app could be all about car dependency, which should be regarded as a chronic disease, with some of the methods used by 'quit smoking' apps to keep users motivated to ride a bicycle or walk, rather than get in the tin coffin.
The pencil‑and‑notepad takes make sense once the ritual is already mutual; the failure mode I see is partial adherence, where informal notes silently diverge. A purpose‑built helper can be the workflow, not only the record of it.
I’ve shipped a couple of relatives‑only gadgets; “it worked” usually meant routines lined up across people, not that the tech was flashy.
So if I were to do this, I'd find a way to read that data somehow, and then I'd just need to know who was driving. (Which, as someone pointed out, I'd probably do with some sort of RFID tag on everyone's keys.)
But yeah, the manual entry part would absolutely be the biggest drag here.
Kind like the ? before Profit!
This could be easily solved with a pencil and notepad.
And sure, relaxing that requirement would make for an easier implementation. But also worse acceptance by users.
Safe to LLM generate it, unless you want to learn something in the process, in which case do whatever parts you want to learn about manually.
Had an 100% generated app with one user - me - on my phone's home screen since some time last year.
This is how I described it to the LLM (which wasn't even one of the coding assistants, just Gemini free). Not the exact prompt, that was more detailed, but that's the idea. I did like 3 iterations just to add features, because everything worked the first time.
It's a javascript app configured to work as a PWA on my phone's home screen. I don't know javascript or what a PWA is, I just told the LLM make it into a PWA and it generated the extra files and told me how to set them up on my web server.
The goal is to record when I smoke in hope that seeing the totals will help me cut down. Unfortunately what a LLM can't solve is me remembering to open the damn app and press the button every time I light one, but at least I'm trying...
Edit: and just for the record, in spite of the above I still think 95% of the "AI" evangelism is lies, bullshit and stuff like that.
One day I'll run into something that works for me...
Also i know cigarettes & vapers do not always mix, but man I do always dream of creating a vape that can be set to a limited number of puffs/hour. It's probably the only way of actually controlling it or at least warning you, like you mentioned.
But still, fun that we can make these apps so easily now!
So I made an IOS app just for us that does face detection and won't take the actual photo until all of the detected faces have their eyes open.
Small thing, used by a few people, solves one annoying problem, and nobody really cares if it’s not “proper software”.
It's so powerful and you can build so many custom UIs on it.
I started it for smart home automations but on daily basis I use it more for managing tasks,scheduling reminders.
And with Claude code remote even my not so technical wife uses it to build her tiny utility apps.
All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head.
That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.
echo <input id=kmbefore><input id=kmafter onleave='alert( (kmafter.value - kmbefore.value) * priceperlitterperkm )'>
> index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free!
For the fancy version I'd make priceperlitterperkm URL parameter to make it work not just for my area. But that's like an entire additional like of code.
My point being... I'd make a Web page, on app, no deployment, no tracking.
ssh homeserver 'echo hi >> /var/www/self-published/index.html' and voila. I'll probably share my gist this way from the CLI.
ssh homeserver "echo '$(ls)' >> /var/www/self-published/index.html" if I want to run a command locally first, not on homeserver (notice the " vs ').
echo <input id=kmbefore><input id=kmafter onleave='alert( (kmafter.value - kmbefore.value) * priceperlitterperkm )'>
> index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free!
* a server running 24/7 on the internet, paid for each month
* purchased, setup and keep paying every year a domain name
* configured a web server in that server, ideally with automated SSL certificate issue and renewal
- a place with electricity
- an Internet connection
- a computer, no matter how small (it can literally be a-cig)
which isn't true for literally every one but clearly for OP was.
You don't need a server in the cloud though, like I said a home server is enough.
Also, alerts are terrible UX. At least put some effort into your example.
Nothing a notebook and a pencil can't fix, of course, but an app is more fun.
I don't think it's laziness, I think it's an excuse to do a personal hobby project. Makes perfect sense to me.
Of course, and I do things like that too. I didn't mean to be critical only to give back some perspective precisely when it's NOT about learning.
I do believe though that being able to do a subtraction and a multiplication, even if both roughly approximated, for an adult in our current societies (as in not living like an hermit in the woods) is a very useful skill, even if just not get scammed while going shopping or to know how many items one can buy.
Again this isn't reciting the first 100 digits or Pi or doing (12345-12158) * 0.3223 in your head in .1s, rather it's about (~12300-12100) * .3 and knowing you should put about ~20 bucks in, not 1 buck nor 100, and if you want to be "safe" or "kind" to others you put 30 bucks, a very safe upper bound and be done with it.
OK maybe the 1st time you have to write it down. Maybe you even put your phone out and use the calculator but it should after a couple of times become pretty straightforward.
edit: if you don't have dyscalculia I think it's worth couple of seconds in your life because the ability does improve with practice and it's helpful in plenty of places.
Notably, the only parts of this that could not have been done by a well configured agent in a weekend with SOTA today is the futzing with app stores and the UX iterations.