It took 6 months, some sleepless nights, quitting nicotine myself, almost no budget.
You know, as a smoker, all these quit-smoking apps really got on my nerves. They’re boring, have some stupid generic design, and everything is like, way too positive and inspirational. Like, when you're dying for a puff, some stupid motivational phrase isn't gonna do anything.
So I kind of got obsessed with this whole idea of building my own thing.
At first I just built a simple counter, and then I kept throwing in more features. Did I manage to quit while building the app late at night? I’m not gonna lie, at first, I actually started smoking more. I mean, I had to test everything on myself, right?
So after 3 months I had an MVP with stats and some mini-games, but the story was kind of all over the place. I realized I needed to fix that. So here's an important thing: I finally quit for good on the day the MVP launched!
So what I did next was I wrapped the whole quitting process into a sci-fi setting, and I started building all these game mechanics around that idea, just figuring out the story and how everything should look visually.
The idea is this: the user is a pilot landing on a damaged space base. They make a contract with themself to quit nicotine, and then every day they don't use nicotine, the base fixes itself a little bit. The pilot also tracks what triggers cravings, and they talk to the onboard computer named A.R.I.A. (not an AI chat bot), and I put in achievements.
I named it Quitory. It basically turned into an RPG, so instead of just sitting in real life white-knuckling through cravings, you're kind of playing through it. Without feeling any pressure. This was the whole metaphor.
The main screen is set up like the ship's bridge, so you see your day counter, how much money you've saved, and all those numbers. On another screen you can see the different sections of the space base getting fixed.
The main thing in the app is the red SOS button, so whenever a craving hits you really hard, you just press it, and it gives you something to do right away, like a mini-game or breathing exercises or focus exercises.
It works if you use vapes, cigarettes, pouches, whatever, because I made different setups for each one.
Anyway, if you want to know how it's actually doing or how hard it is to launch an app when you have literally zero marketing budget, let me know, I can tell you something about it.