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.

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!

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.

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.

Small thing, used by a few people, solves one annoying problem, and nobody really cares if it’s not “proper software”.

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.

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.

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.