I Tried Building a Real App With AI. It Took a Year.

My wife and I have been looking for an app to track things like habits, hobbies, and when we last did certain chores. To be honest there are probably hundreds of different habit trackers on the App Store. Next to todo list apps they are supposed to be the easiest apps to create so it is not really that surprising there are so many options. But we must have tried dozens of different apps but none of them quite fit what we were looking for. Of course now we have AI, so this sort of thing should be easy to create. You just right a couple of prompts and AI will build it for you, while you sleep, or sip cocktails on the beach. As we shall see it didn't quite turn out that way. Requirements and Existing Apps # So for this app I had a few requirements: We wanted to have the habits in a long list and not have to go through multiple pages to find them. We didn't want any data be stored in the cloud or on other peoples servers. We wanted to be able to use the gen-emojis from iOS 18 for some of…