Mum's Memories
Summary
Mum's Memories is a minimal baby journaling app I am building for my own use. Parents can record milestones and write letters to their baby. I am getting it ready for a wider release.
Updates
- Submitted the app for closed testing on Google Play Store. The Play Console listing is live and testers can join via a Google Group.
- Upgraded to Expo SDK 57 and bumped version codes through a few rounds while ironing out the build pipeline.
- Made the paywall live.
- Ran a craft pass using Claude Opus across the whole app: spring animations, interruptible transitions, shared headers, and a restructured Profile and Settings screen.
- Simplified the data model. I collapsed entry types down to just note and milestone. I felt that early types were mostly redundant.
- Merged Timeline and Memories into a single Journal tab with Day and Browse views. This is still a work in progress. I think with more features in the future, I may bring back the navbar tabs.
- Cut onboarding down to 5 screens. Completely removed the premium upsell screens. Now, onboarding can be finished in under 90 seconds.
- Set up a staging Docker Compose stack and wired EAS build profiles to it. Still need to set up staging R2 bucket and domains, but this is a good start. It will let me test new features in a production-like environment before releasing.
- Personalised the writing prompts in the composer screen. They now adapt to the baby name and age. Still no AI, but the prompts feel personal now.
- Added milestone age-at-date stamps and a Firsts index in Browse. It is now easy to see all the firsts of the baby in one place.
- Changed the architecture from per-baby profiles to a blended view throughout the app. It is easy to filter by baby, and the default view shows all babies together. This was a big change, but I think it is the right one.