Clarity - Your personal sobriety tracker

The main problem - just another tracking application

I wanted a clearer picture of my bad habits: smoking, snus and zyns, and how much Adderall I take in a day. So I went digging through the App Store for something that could track daily consumption. I tried a handful of apps, and every single one of them hit me with a premium tier or a paywall before I could even get started. That annoyed me enough to build my own, shaped exactly around what I needed. That's how Clarity came about.

You want it? You can make it!

I have programming experience, but I had never written anything for iOS. These days that barely matters, because AI fills exactly that gap. I pay for two Claude Pro accounts so I can keep working with Opus 4.8 without constantly running into usage limits, and that setup worked really well for this project.

Apple's development ecosystem

Xcode took me a while to get comfortable with. Once it clicked, though, everything went smoothly. The Simulator is the part that sold me: you pick an Apple device and boot it up right on your Mac. Curious how the app behaves on an iPhone 13? Spin one up and see for yourself. There is also a live preview canvas that re-renders your interface as you type, which felt like magic the first few times. Learning my way around Apple's ecosystem turned out to be the fun part.

What does the app cost in the App Store?

I did think about adding a small tip option to offset what the app costs me. Publishing on the App Store means buying a developer license tied to your Apple account, and that runs 99 euros a year. The catch is that I don't own a company, so I don't have a partita IVA, the Italian VAT number you need before you are allowed to earn anything from an app. For now Clarity is free for early adopters. If it does well later on, I will probably switch it to a one time purchase of something like 2.99 euros.

How long did it take me to build the app?

I track my time with Wakapi, which logs every hour I spend in an editor and files it under the project name. Clarity came out at roughly 36 hours. The real number is higher, because Wakapi doesn't count the time I spent googling things or poking around in other apps to see which features they offered and how they solved certain problems. The app is nowhere near perfect right now, but I would rather ship it and learn from what breaks, and from what users tell me they want.

Got an idea to make the app better, or something you want changed?

Any kind of feedback is welcome. Write me at hello@danobe.dev and tell me how it went for you. I genuinely enjoy hearing from people who tried the app, especially if it helped them in some way. A rating in the App Store would also be greatly appreciated.