smol: Pet Health Tracker

smol takes the mental load out of pet care: bringing daily tracking, routines, reminders, shared care, and health history into one calm place.

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Inspiration

Pet care is made up hundreds of small moments like meals, meds, symptoms, walks/play, reminders, and handoffs between caregivers or sitters. That information often ends up scattered across your head, notes, text messages, emails, and calendars. I built smol to reduce that mental load and give pet parents a reliable place to organize everyday care and maintain a clear health history. My fiancée and I have 2 cats, so organizing daily care sometimes turns to chaos. Our family's cat also passed away on August 6th, which happens to be the same day my App Store review got approved so now, this product hits closer to home than it originally did when I first started developing it.

What it does

smol is an iOS-first pet health and care tracker that helps people:

  • Quickly log meals, water, medication, symptoms, activity, weight, and daily check-ins
  • Build routines and receive care reminders
  • Review calendars, charts, and health snapshots to notice changes over time
  • Coordinate care with family members and pet sitters
  • Track medication and antiparasitic inventory
  • Generate structured, vet-ready PDF health reports It also brings care into native iOS experiences through Home and Lock Screen widgets, Live Activities, Siri, Shortcuts, and Spotlight. smol is an organizational tool, and not a replacement for veterinary advice.

How we built it

I built smol with TypeScript, React Native, and Expo, using Expo Router for navigation. Custom Swift and SwiftUI components power the native widget, Live Activities, searchable controls, and App Intents. Supabase provides authentication, PostgreSQL storage, Realtime synchronization, file storage, row-level security, and Edge Functions. TanStack Query manages server state, while Zustand handles lightweight local state. Subscriptions and premium entitlements are powered by RevenueCat, with access enforced in both the app and backend. A Cloudflare Workers gateway adds request validation, rate limiting, and another layer of protection before traffic reaches Supabase. Sentry and PostHog support reliability and privacy-conscious product analytics.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest design challenge was supporting a large amount of care information without making the app feel clinical or overwhelming. Logging had to be fast enough for daily use while still producing useful history later. Shared care introduced another challenge: multiple people need to see consistent information without gaining inappropriate access. That required careful synchronization, permissions, expiring invitations, and database-level security. I also learned that subscriptions are much more than displaying a paywall. Premium access must remain consistent across navigation, direct links, shared pets, database reads, backend writes, upgrades, restores, and downgrades. Finally, health-related data demanded a strong privacy and safety boundary. smol organizes factual records and patterns without presenting itself as a diagnostic or treatment tool.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Turning a complex pet-care system into an approachable daily experience.
  • Building one connected platform for quick logs, routines, reminders, shared care, health trends, inventory, and vet-ready reports.
  • Extending smol beyond the app with native iOS widgets, Live Activities, Siri, Shortcuts, and Spotlight.
  • Creating secure, real-time collaboration for families and pet sitters with carefully enforced permissions.
  • Implementing RevenueCat subscriptions with consistent entitlement enforcement across the app and backend.
  • Making privacy, accessibility, localization, and non-diagnostic health language foundational and not just afterthoughts.

What we learned

I learned that a trustworthy consumer health product is built from many small details: accessible interactions, clear language, secure defaults, reliable synchronization, thoughtful notifications, and graceful failure states. Most importantly, I learned that the best pet-care tracker is not the one asking users to record everything. It's the one that makes recording the important things feel effortless.

What's next for smol: Pet Health Tracker

I would love to learn how people use this app and how it helps them stay on top of their pets' health. I'll be making updates to the app based on feedback and analytics, making sure we keep what users find useful and getting rid of features that are over-engineered or are not being used at all.

I'm dedicating this project to our family cat Skye, who crossed the rainbow bridge on August 6th, 2026.

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