-
-
Icon
-
Screenshot
Inspiration
Like many people I can struggle with ADHD. Having too many toughts/ideas, bouncing from project to project, needing physical reminders to remember to do simple tasks like laundry, and so much more. The name of the app "Brainfire" is something I think a lot of people in my position can relate to; your brain feeling like it is on fire. My entire life I've kept extensive lists of all my thoughts/ideas that I have throughout the day. Doesn't matter how big or small it was I would write it down because if I didn't, the thought would be out of my mind 5 minutes later. If I was lucky it would pop back into my head at some point, but more often than not it was gone forever.
What it does
Brainfire helps me keep my thoughts/ideas organized by priority. Reminders or short term things that I need to be reminder of in the short term go in the active section which has a home screen widget so I can always see them when I open my phone. Then there is the standard inbox where more medium term things go. Then there is the "shelf" which is for long term thoughts/ideas that don't require immediate action but that you want to remember.
There are also programmable reminder notifications so you can set how often you want to be reminder about thoughts. There is also a streaks feature and users are rewarded with points for cleaning up their thoughts. This includes completing your short term tasks or "letting go" of some of your long term thoughts. Users can use 30 points to redeem 1 free day of premium access to Brainfire.
From personal experience, I know these notes can get very personal so none of the user's notes ever leave the app. There is no backend storing all the data so users don't have to worry about a data breach.
How we built it
I built this using react-native and expo with a simple cloudlare workers backend. I built it mostly at night and over the weekends when I got free time from my day job
Challenges we ran into
The Apple subscription architecture doesn't allow the free premium access to work how I would like it to. Ideally it would push the next billing date the number of days the user has redeemed but as of now, Apple doesn't allow doing this for promotional use.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Even though the redemption doesn't work exactly how I wanted it to work, I am still proud of the idea and the implementation. I am also proud of how simple, yet effective I've found the app to be. I know how common it is for ADHD people to get a burst of motivation to do something, go all in on it for 2 hours, and then get bored and move on. The simple nature helps me keep my thoughts organized without losing interest.
What we learned
I learned that Apple review can take a VERY long time
What's next for Brainfire: ADHD Notes and Focus
I'm looking into adding more complex note types. Things like media uploads or simple formatting options, I don't plan on moving away from the 3 priority setup. I also want to add per note notification settings so the user can set notification preferences per note and per priority
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.