ReadMate

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  Screenshot without device frames

Inspiration

I became an Avid reader when I bought my first Kindle. But, as with everything in life, I was trying to read too many books at once, and frequently had to start from the beginning of a book, just because I didn't read it for a long time. I tried using Notion, Apple Notes, and countless book tracking apps to keep my reading in check. However, all of them were way too complicated, and adding a book was too much friction. I wanted an app that would allow me to add a book quickly. And this is when the idea of ReadMate was born.

What it does

ReadMate is a pretty simple app on first glance. You have 2 main pages, the inbox and the library. When you add a book it goes to the inbox first. Once you change the status of the book to reading or read, the book disappears from the inbox and goes to the library, depending on the status.

How I built it

I was playing around with SwiftUI at first, but I was always running into problems, mostly because of my inexperience. Since I work as a Flutter developer, I decided to give Flutter a try, and I was pleasantly surprised of how fast and easy it was to build an MVP. And also, RevenueCat made the whole process of adding subscriptions so easy.

Challenges I ran into

As mentioned, at first I ran into challenges with technologies that I was not familiar with. The next thing, were the subscriptions. This was my first time adding subscriptions to any app, and even though the process of showing a paywall was pretty easy, thanks to RevenueCat, the submission to the App Store was extremely hard. This took around 60% of my time during the hackaton.

What I learned

Building ReadMate taught me the importance of choosing the right tools for the job. While experimenting with SwiftUI was fun, choosing to use Flutter allowed me to move faster due to my experience. I believe I also learned the value of simplicity in app design, and how important it is to reduce friction for users. Handling subscriptions and navigating the App Store submission process was really challenging, but again RevenueCat helped a lot. Ultimately, I feel like this project helped me grow immensely as a developer.

Built With

• flutter