Petame

Petame turns dreams, goals, and inspirations into vision boards that stay close to you every day.
Organize your vision boards in one place and create new boards whenever inspiration strikes.
Create personalized vision boards by combining photos, cutouts, and decorative elements on a customizable canvas.
Turn any photo into a clean, ready-to-use sticker with automatic background removal.
Unlock premium backgrounds and creative themes through a seamless subscription experience powered by RevenueCat.
Keep your goals visible every day with a beautiful vision board widget on your iPhone Home Screen.
Petame - app icon

Inspiration

Vision boards are a proven way to keep your goals in front of you — but a cork board on the wall can't follow you around, and most "mood board" apps stop at making something pretty. I wanted a board that is playful to build (like cutting out photos and pasting stickers as a kid) and that actually tracks whether your wishes come true. That became Petame: Vision Board — "picture your dreams, then make them real."

What it does

Petame turns your photos into a living vision board:

📸 Snap or pick a photo → instant sticker. On-device background removal (VisionKit) cuts out the subject automatically, so every photo becomes a paste-able sticker.
✍️ Attach a wish. Each sticker carries a short intention ("run a full marathon", "move to the coast") plus a category tag.
✅ Track it from "manifesting" to "achieved." Not just a mood board — when a wish comes true you check it off and the board celebrates it.
🎨 Make it yours. Free-form drag / pinch / rotate collage, 28 background designs (watercolor, cork, washi, sakura…), handwriting stickers drawn with Skia, and text stickers in 7 hand-picked fonts.
📱 Home Screen widget. Your board lives on your Home Screen (small & large families), so your dreams stay in sight every day.
📤 Share. Export a square image or a 9:16 story card with a motivational quote, localized per language.
🌏 4 in-app languages (EN / JA / KO / zh-Hans) and 8 App Store locales.

How I built it

Expo SDK 56 + React Native 0.85 on the New Architecture, with the React Compiler enabled and expo-router typed routes.
@shopify/react-native-skia + Reanimated 4 + Gesture Handler power the collage canvas: normalized [0,1] transforms so a board lays out identically on any device, a 25-step undo stack, and a handwriting tool with a native SwiftUI color picker.
zustand + SQLite (expo-sqlite) as the local source of truth — no backend server, everything stays on device.
expo-widgets + App Groups render the board into an iOS widget; a custom config plugin injects a live AppEntity picker so the widget's settings show your real board names.
OneSignal for push (permission asked at the value moment — right after creating a board, never at launch), PostHog for product analytics.

How I use RevenueCat

RevenueCat is the entire monetization layer of Petame Pro:

Custom paywall designed as a tear-off "Pro Pass" ticket (perforated edge, shimmer CTA, staggered entry animations), rendered generically from getOfferings() — Monthly / Annual ("Best value") / Lifetime ("Yours forever").
Honest trial disclosure: intro-price data is normalized to days and checkTrialOrIntroductoryPriceEligibility makes sure "7 days free" is only shown to users who actually qualify.
Entitlement-driven gating: a single Petame Pro entitlement unlocks 50 boards, 100 stickers per board, premium backgrounds and the large widget; the free tier stays genuinely useful (1 board, 20 stickers).
Offer code redemption via presentCodeRedemptionSheet() right from Settings.
Analytics joined end-to-end: the RevenueCat app user ID and pro status are PostHog super-properties, and every paywall view carries a typed source (board_limit, sticker_limit, premium_background, settings) so I can see exactly which limit converts.
Purchase listener keeps entitlements in sync across purchase / restore / expiry, with localized error handling per RevenueCat error code.

Challenges I ran into

Config-plugin ordering: OneSignal's plugin must run before expo-widgets or the widget extension loses its aps-environment entitlement — the reason app.config.ts is TypeScript with carefully ordered plugins.
Widget memory limits: synchronous full-size image decode crashed the widget extension; boards are now auto-captured and downscaled to 720px JPEG before hitting the App Group.
A 36.5 MB share image 😅 — the story export pipeline now produces ~660 KB.
The iOS Simulator can't do background removal, so the core feature could only be tested on real devices.
RevenueCat Test Store keys don't support Customer Center, so it's temporarily replaced with restore + showManageSubscriptions() until production keys land.

Accomplishments I'm proud of

Shipped v1.0.1 solo in ~7.5 weeks — 172 commits from empty repo to App Store submission.
An onboarding that isn't a slideshow: a 6-step interactive tour where you build a real mini-collage and paste your first photo before you ever see the main screen.
A data-driven ASO baseline: keyword research across 14 storefronts and 250+ keywords before writing a single line of store metadata.
Thoughtful defaults everywhere: review prompts gated by real engagement (3 days / 3 launches / 3 stickers), pro-gating that never deletes user data, and graceful degradation when native modules are missing.

What I learned

Monetization is a product feature, not an afterthought — typed paywall sources and trial-eligibility checks took hours to build and completely change what you can learn from week one.
On-device ML (VisionKit subject segmentation) is finally good enough to build a whole UX around — as long as you design a fallback for older devices.
Widgets are a retention feature disguised as a rendering problem.

What's next

RevenueCat Customer Center once production API keys replace the Test Store.
Android launch — the code ships dark (API key deliberately null so Test Store purchases can never leak into production).
Board sharing between friends, more background designs, and richer "achieved" celebrations.