The quarantine and isolation forcibly imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic are a time of particular emotional hardship, as we can all witness first-hand: some are locked inside, away from their friends and family; others are stuck in a foreign country, miles away from their loved ones -- but if there's one thing we can all agree on, is that this is no easy moment for anyone, on a global scale.
In this context, mood trackers are a valuable resource for a much wider and diverse set of people, as the whole world experiences lockdown: for many, myself included, these surreal days tend to merge together in a big grey blob, and keeping track of the few events and our emotional responses with a simple journal or app is a great way to keep a grip on reality; for people suffering from all sorts of mental health conditions, this becomes a fundamental tool for coping with the challenges of every day, magnified by the current situation.
Now, the sheer number of mood tracker apps available around is staggering, and rightly so: they're all different in character, features and purpose, and each of them is appealing in its own unique and stylish way. And even though they all have in common a handful of essential features, transferring even extremely basic data between the various apps is often way too rough: they all export it in different formats and with different internal structures, and not all of them even support a truly user-owned backup in the first place.
That's when I came up with the idea of some piece of software for "translating" the data from one app to the other, so that mood tracker users don't have to lose all their progress and start over each time they switch to a new app.
It builds upon the apps' backup-restore functionalities: it takes the data coming from the first app's export, with its own formatting, and reformats it accordingly to what the second app expects for restoring from a backup file.
A lot of effort went -- and is still going -- into scouting for what apps to involve, and we're actively working on implementations for more and more apps.
While I do recognise that it could be seen as a way for users to ditch your app and migrate to others, that same applies to all other apps as well, and data ownership and freedom of use are noble principles worth striving for.
Users shouldn't be bound to only using one single app just because that's the one they've been introduced to, only being able to retain their data when changing device -- but clinging to the same app -- and through an opaque, remote backup they can neither access nor even view; they shouldn't have to give up all their previous data and start from scratch whenever they decide to try out a new app.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.