Bell, Minus Whistles
About four weeks ago, I started working on a meditation app for iOS. Despite my background in front-end development and my general curiosity about tech that’s far above my pay grade, I don’t believe I ever so much as opened Xcode until then, and I’ve never written a line of Swift before.
I knew what I wanted to build, what I had searched the App Store so often trying to find: a simple, unguided meditation app that mostly just gets out of your way. It needed to support a basic meditation session (duration, lead-in, start sound, interval chimes, and end sound), continue working when backgrounded/locked, provide ambient audio during sessions, and write Mindfulness Minutes to Apple Health. To be frank, I thought I could do most of this in the Shortcuts app, if it weren’t for it’s tendency to background and lose tasks with longer timers, so I felt confident enough to start researching.
I have personally tried about 12 popular meditation apps, and further competitive research provided insights on user expectations, and what not to build. There’s a clear gap in the market for a solid tool without subscriptions, in-app purchases, “news”, or social media connections.
I started designing and building, following tutorials and example projects, getting a lot of help, and I slowly started to wrap my mind around Swift, UIKit, and iOS development in general. After a few weeks of work, I started beta testing with a few friends via TestFlight.
The journey from a simple idea to an app, working on my phone has been so enjoyable and challenging, filled with both delight and extreme frustration–all of the meditation sessions needed for testing certainly helped, and taught me so much about what made the app feel good to use.
I’ve launched a simple marketing site at bellmeditation.app. If you’d like to test it in its early stages, feel free to join the beta.