Touch Grass

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Inspiration

In late 2025, a new trend emerged where teenagers all over TikTok sat with nothing but their thoughts, in boredom, for an hour or more to "fix" their attention span. With the rise of short form content, social media addiction has become a more prevalent problem than ever and people are struggling to put the phone down. We ourselves believe we could benefit from this app, which motivated us to bring it to life. Gen Z and Millennials deserve to be fully present in their day-to-day and Touch Grass aims to bring this humanity back into their life.

What it does

Our app lets you set goals on the duration of your phone usage (daily, weekly, or monthly), and allows you to compete against your friends. You can check up on your friends' progress throughout the day, holding them accountable and achieving your goals all together.

How we built it

This app was built on Android Studio using Kotlin, TypeScript, React Native, and Firebase. We referred to android's api reference to access our emulator's screentime.

Challenges we ran into

We had never used the Android Developer environment nor the Android Emulator that comes with it so we ran into quite a few challenges while setting up our environment. Another challenge we faced was finding an API that would let us retrieve real time screen time data. We initially thought of using IOS app development, but realized it would not be feasible given Apple's restrictions on accessing screen time data. We also faced issues solving merge conflicts (classic).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For some of us, this was our first app development experience which makes the completion that much more rewarding. We are proud of delivering a well-rounded game that we believe can truly bring people together.

What we learned

We learned how to make a complete android app, how to run and install an emulator, and the power of friendship (peer programming).

What's next for Touch Grass

Add a push notification system that notifies you when you or a friend has completed or failed a goal. We would also want to make it an IOS compatible app and possibly deploy it to the App Store!