Wash Your Hands Streaks iOS App

Mar 2020 - Apr 2020

SwiftSwiftUIFirebase

I had always wanted to learn how to make an app. No, not like half-make an app. Like, really make an app. And what better time would it have been for me to teach myself than when I was locked inside my house with, quite frankly, not much else to do (school had just closed down due to COVID-19).

I needed to start small. So, everyday from March 15th, 2020, I worked on Swift and SwiftUI courses from an amazing site called HackingWithSwift. If I had done the 100 days of lessons, I would have had the knowledge to build an extraordinary first app. But I wanted to do something now, I didn't want to have to wait till June.

Then it just hit me — why not, for a small app, create one to remind users to wash their hands during COVID-19? After all, at the time, people thought that washing hands would end the pandemic, so I thought it would be a genius app!

So I looked through the App Store for any apps like that…and nothing. Great! (While developing the app a few others came out, though).

I started conceptualizing the idea in my head and decided to make it into a streak system — the more people washed their hands, the more they were rewarded. I had known just enough SwiftUI at that point that I was confident I could make the app, and so I set to work.

I soon found that it wasn't easy. Designing the UI was pretty simple, but actually getting everything to work properly was very hard. I had to work with dates a lot, and account for every possible thing the user would do — whether it was open the app during their streak, close it while they were getting one, wait a few days after washing hands, not have internet connection to download the current total streaks, and so on. My code resulted in a ton of if statements and copied and pasted code (I was not aware of the idea of writing once and using everywhere yet!). I also wrote the entire app in a single view 😅.

But in the end, after a week or so of 10-hour days working on it, it was complete. I went to submit it to the App Store, crossed my fingers, aaanndddd…rejected!

I really had no idea why it would get rejected. Was it not "unique" enough? Did it not work on their device? Did they not like the idea??? But when I opened the Resolution Center, I was really quite surprised at what the issue was. Apparently they did not allow any references to "COVID-19" in the app since they only wanted COVID-19-related apps to be published by official organizations, not some high schooler on Long Island. So all I had to do was delete any references to "COVID-19" in the app by marketing it slightly differently, and…accepted!

The app has about 120 hundred downloads as of August 20, 2020. Not very many, but enough that I am satisfied. It was a very fun app to build, and I am looking forward to building many more later in life.