IQ Max

Brain training without the noise. IQ Max measures your baseline, then builds a daily routine whose difficulty climbs with you, so you're always at your edge.

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Inspiration

Most brain-training apps hand you a random puzzle, cheer with confetti and call it progress. I wanted the opposite: a calm, honest app that measures where you actually are and then trains you, a little every day, at the exact edge of what you can do. IQ Max came from that idea: find your baseline, then max it out.

What it does

  • 7 onboarding tests measure your cognitive baseline across memory, attention, processing speed and motor precision.
  • 10 adaptive disciplines make up your daily routine. You choose what to focus on and the app builds one short session around it.
  • Difficulty never lets you coast. Corridors narrow, guides fade, rules change and timers appear as you improve.
  • Star bands and streaks keep progress visible, and an iOS home-screen widget keeps your streak one glance away.
  • Built to respect your focus: no score noise mid-game, no manipulative pop-ups, no invented numbers.

How I built it

IQ Max is a Flutter app with a native iOS widget, and RevenueCat handles all monetization. AI tools were part of my workflow from start to finish: prototyping game mechanics, debugging scoring algorithms, reviewing UX flows and producing visual assets.

Without any 3D modeling or complex vector work, I used AI tools to generate a set of mascot poses and placed each one where it carries emotional weight: onboarding, results, streak moments and the paywall. The mascot gives the app a personality without breaking its calm, minimal design language.

On the monetization side I chose a hard paywall: the baseline tests and your first result are free, and the daily routine is Pro. I added a streak-repair consumable so a missed day doesn't mean losing weeks of work, and I use RevenueCat subscriber attributes to personalize the paywall around each user's own results.

Challenges I ran into

Science before code. Every exercise had to rest on real, peer-reviewed cognitive science, both in what it measures and in how it scores you. Researching established paradigms for verbal, visual, working, sequential and numerical memory, processing speed and motor precision, and turning them into fair scoring and banding, took almost as long as writing the code.

Consistency at scale. Making 7 tests and 10 mini-games behave and score consistently meant running and debugging thousands of test sessions and tuning the algorithms again and again until a score meant the same thing everywhere.

Wearing hats I didn't own. I'm not a UI/UX designer or a marketer. I had to learn design principles, paywall strategy, pricing research and consumable design (how to sell help without selling pressure) from scratch.

Shipping to the store. App review is where many indie apps stall. I prepared the metadata, subscription disclosures and review notes carefully. When feedback came, I addressed it precisely and got IQ Max live.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • A complete, science-grounded product in production: 17 distinct cognitive tasks with one coherent scoring system.
  • A design that stays calm and precise throughout, with a mascot that adds warmth without clutter.
  • A monetization model that's transparent about what's paid and built natively on RevenueCat.

What I learned

My biggest lesson was how much further one developer can go with AI tools used deliberately, as a collaborator for research, design and debugging rather than a shortcut. I also learned how design decisions shape whether users actually reach the value of an app, what it takes to ship native iOS features like widgets from Flutter, and how to think about pricing and paywalls as part of the product rather than an afterthought.

What's next for IQ Max

More disciplines, deeper long-term progress insights, paywall and pricing experiments through RevenueCat, and bringing the full experience to Android.

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