Pill Reminder: PillPal

PillPal, never miss a dose again.

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Inspiration

I have my mother and my sister taking pills every day for their medical prescriptions, one day my mother told me how she started to struggle to remember the exact times when she should take her medication. Then, I thought that it would be a good idea to have an easy to use app for my mother to start remembering her pills schedule. At first, my sister and I tried to search for an already existing App, but we came across with several that were too hard to understand for my mother and did not solve the issue she had.

What it does

That's why I created Pill Reminder: PillPal, an app that lets you configure your daily pills and doses and sends you notifications right on time, so you never miss a pill. It also has a widget you can put on your home screen, so any time you open your phone you see the doses left for the day.

How we built it

We used:

  • ReactNative for the frontend
  • Firebase for the backend and push notifications
  • RevenueCat for subscriptions
  • Admob to monetize trough ads the free users
  • Amplitude to track user behavior and understand what works and what doesn't
  • Claude code for coding development and testing
  • Gemini MCP for assets creation

Challenges we ran into

  • Apple rejecting the initial version a couple of times due to the discount offer we created for people who cancel the initial purchase at the end of the onboarding
  • UI design to make it easy to use for advance aged users

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Widget iOS. This single feature makes the app very useful for users who opens their phone and needs to see very quick what doses are left for the day.
  • Onboarding flow is very well designed to explain the user how to use the app and it configure the initial pills schedules before entering the app

What we learned

  • One thing is what a developer think it's useful and is going to work, but other thing is what actually people is asking for in their app. Sometimes over-engineering makes the app to complex to understand for the end user.

What's next for Pill Reminder: PillPal

  • New mascot desings and a whatsapp connector so we will remind users about their pills trough push notifications and trough Whatsapp messages.
  • Future, if WhatsApp reminders works, will be having SMS with medication reminders as well
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