Update Saturday, 15 February 2025.

I released a minor upgrade, adding more plants, fixing the persistent storage issue, and changing the price from free to £1.99.

Over new year, the app reached number nine on the App Store charts for the food & drink category!

Seed of an idea

I made this app in a whirl of excitement after watching a 100-second intro to React Native video on YouTube. Until then, I had seen the technology listed in many job descriptions but didn't know what it did, so I was thrilled to learn that I could create an iPhone app with my existing skills.

The idea for this app came from the book 'Food for Life' by Tim Spector, which recommends eating 30 plant foods per week to promote gut microbiome diversity, nutritional intake, and lots of other health benefits. Unlike '5 fruits and vegetables per day', it's based on solid medical evidence and is quickly becoming the go-to dietary target.

While this target is easier to achieve than you might think - coffee, tea, and chocolate all count - keeping track of them all can be difficult.

There's an existing 'Plant Counter' app on the App Store, but it's plagued with poor reviews and functionality issues. After confirming these problems firsthand, I decided to tackle the challenge myself with my first iPhone app, 'Plant-Counter'.

Cultivating the concept

Expecting the deployment process to be arduous, I kept the app very simple, knowing how frustrated I'd feel if I had made a super cool app that no one could use.

To avoid wasting time with endless revisions, I adopted a structured approach: before I wrote any code, I'd first list the essential features for a minimum viable product and then create a design mockup in Pixelmator.

This plan sounds sensible and entirely obvious to me now, but only a few months ago, I would have launched straight into the code without a moment's thought. Growth!

Features

Keeping the project as skeletal as possible, I decided on these features.

• A prominent plant count.
• A long list of hardcoded plants - no back-end to complicate things.
• An excellent search feature - fuzzy search by name, alternative name (rocket/arugula, etc.), or category.
• A reset button, with a confirmation dialogue to prevent accidental trigger.
• Sort alphabetically or by group.
• Social sharing page - not strictly part of an MVP, but a nice, easy feature to implement.

Design and planning

Once I decided on the features, I designed an interface.

My main inspiration was the TickTick app, which has a similar functionality. I tried using a subtle green background instead, but unfortunately, this was quite disgusting.

Plant-Counter app control panel screenshot

TickTick iPhone screenshot

I used one of Google's Material Icons (weirdly, the symbol for psychiatry) for the app icon, which are free to use, even for commercial projects.

People have told me they love the icon and think it looks very professional, but in retrospect, I'm not sure it's fit for purpose, as it suggests that the app is about gardening rather than nutrition.

Thorny issues

Despite my familiarity with React and TypeScript, venturing into React Native presented a few challenges. The project, which would have been a quick endeavour in standard React, required significantly more time and effort, primarily due to the differences in how styles are handled. Learning to use Xcode, Expo, and NativeWind took a lot of study, too.

A particular difficulty was getting the control panel (with the search bar, reset and sort buttons) to slide in and out of hiding. On a website, this is straightforward (animate the height from 0px to 100%), but in React Native, I had to find a workaround, which I did by setting the height to a fixed amount, ensuring that it was big enough for all devices.

Deployment was a challenge, too, although from what my friends had told me about Apple and Xcode, I had expected it to be more complicated than it was. In particular, what to put for the privacy policy and support URL were confusing, though I found answers on YouTube. Plus, the sheer number of mockups I had to create for all the different iOS device sizes was tedious.

Harvesting the results

appstoreconnect.apple.com

The project has been more successful than anticipated, with 174 downloads in two months. However, it's far from perfect.

Firstly, it's such a compliment that this person thinks I'm an entire company! Ha! But they make a good point - a friend informed me that spring onions and lemons are also missing.

What I learned

The importance of testing

The missing plants could easily have been added if I had allowed family and friends to test the app before going live. This was partially because I was too excited and partially because I expected setting up TestFlight to be complicated. I now see that this was a mistake, and I could have created a better app had I done so.

Planning pays off

My careful planning paid off because I completed this project in just a few days. My goal was to deploy an app to the App Store, so I consider the project a huge success. Deciding the features and finalising the design before writing any code saved vast amounts of time.

Be more ambitious

Although the MVP idea was ultimately good, I can be more ambitious in the future.

Nurturing growth: Next steps

These are my initial ideas for Plant-Counter V2:

• Add custom plant feature
• Plant group handling (for people who have, for example, the same fruit smoothie every morning)
• Persistent storage
• Start charging - either a one-off fee or a subscription. I would like the app to at least cover my Apple Developer bill, though this has long-term implications and needs to be thought through carefully. Managing a SaS model will be challenging, too.
• Create a marketing website for the app using a Tailwind template.

However...!

I've been reading an incredible book called How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Although ostensibly about large-scale construction project management, it frequently mentions tech megaprojects like the iPhone, HeathCare.gov and the NHS app.

The book highlights the common misconceptions surrounding the idea of 'planning' and illustrates how our approach to it is often fundamentally flawed - even on multi-billion dollar government projects. At the book's heart is the question, 'Why am I doing this project?'.

I won't work on a revised app until I have a proper answer. Besides, I have plenty of other projects to work on!

Conclusion

I learned a lot from this project and enjoyed it thoroughly. Although websites can be just as intricate as apps, weirdly, people are much more impressed by the latter.

I'm sure this won't be the only app I make, but if I do come up with a fantastic idea for another, I'll probably learn Swift to make it.