1
2 Comments

LogMyPoop Health App and Landing Page

Hi

While i am writing this post the ios build process (for test flight) for the app is running.

LogMyPoop App - About Idea

The app is free, no paywalls, no subscriptions, no marketing adverts, no collecting personal information of users.

LogMyPoop App - History
I have been building this app on and off for over a year now. Before this i have started building a couple ios games (Pac Collide and MiniLookout) but none of them released. I know it is a programmer's curse. When things take too much time , we lose interest and move to a more shiny thing. I am a full time corporate dev building azure based business applications 5 days a week 9/5. This project is more around gaining experience and solve my own itch and in that process try to support community around here and Bowel health. I needed an app like that to track but found free ones were too much simple and others were behind subscription.

Landing Page for the app
The landing page for the app is found here
https://www.squaredojo.com/#/logmypoop

The landing page is not a CMS. It is built using svelte which is a javascript preprocessor. It outputs a static html site that is blazing fast to render since browser does not have to process javascript stuff at runtime like other frameworks like React. The site is hosted free on Netlify. I am using their free form to collect email of the users who registering their interest in the app. Will use their emails to manually create a distribution list and email them when the app is published on App store and Play store.

The App - Technology
The app is made using expo and react native and using few libraries but most of the stuff is coded by me (including my own calendar and svg images and the logo). The app will track user's bowel movements and spit out some reports. Basically it is like a toilet diary to keep track of your gut health. It is profile based so an adult can track bowel movements of their kids too in the same app. I decided to use dropbox for import and export of data since it is platform independent across android and ios. So if a user changes phone from ios to android, they can restore backup easily. It was not really straight forward to implement dropbox api in js without using their js sdk. I could not use their sdk coz of incompatibility with crypt library. Installing their sdk i could not build expo project. May be there is a solution but i went ahead and just manually implemented calls to dropbox api in js. It works so i am not fussed.

Current Status
Waiting to publish to test flight and then get some of my friends test the app. Iron out any bugs and move it to production App Store. There after plan to do same thing for android.

Challenge
Marketing or reaching the user groups who will benefit from this app. I signed up related account for reddit. Will also notify at Product Hunt and perhaps look at some facebook groups around Bowel health.

What i want from you ?
Any feedback that you want to share with our community here will be great. If you want to pop to landing page and register your interest then i will notify you when app is launched but i will also be updating story here as i go towards full launch. Thank you very much.

on December 15, 2022
  1. 2

    Well that's a shit idea! Jokes aside, I like the overall look and feel of the landing page, maybe add some easing to the slide-in animation of the images.
    Two more small things:

    • I see the browser tries to load "liverload.js" for 20 second before giving up, live reload isn't required in production so I'd remove it, otherwise clients will think that it's still loading something because the see the browser's loading spinner.
    • using front end frameworks like svelte is great, makes for better sites (imho) and a better developing time, but one drawback is that the browser initially receives an empty page and some building instructions. This is bad for SEO since crawlers usually don't build the page, so all they see is an empty site. Luckily most frameworks can have the pages rendered on server too, in your case with the help of sveltekit: https://kit.svelte.dev/
    1. 1

      cheers jonigiuro. That is a useful feedback. I will remove the live reload . I am focussing on app. It is in testflight at the moment and i have a tester friend who has kindly helped me find bugs that i did not.