TouchGrass

An app for outdoor engagement - one challenge at a time. TouchGrass turns going outside into a daily habit through photo challenges, XP, streaks, and a bit of friendly competition.

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Inspiration

One beautiful summer evening, I was taking a walk in my local park when a realization hit me. Not many people were at the park, despite the cool breeze and perfect temperatures. It was the ideal day to be outside, but why did no one take advantage of it? For a simple reason: people do not always have the time to go on an evening stroll or morning jog and reap the unmatched health benefits. That is why I created TouchGrass, the newest outdoor engagement platform.

TouchGrass was built to encourage individuals to go on regular outdoor excursions. According to a study published by the University of California, Los Angeles, spending just 30 minutes outdoors each day offers significant health benefits.

  1. Stronger immune system - More Vitamin D from sunlight
  2. Better cognitive function - No stressful stimuli
  3. Improved heart health - Increased movement and low stress
  4. Better sleep quality - Through exposure to natural light
  5. Reduced stress/cortisol - Calm, peaceful environment
  6. Physical activity - More motivation when exercising outdoors

Many individuals have busy, stressful schedules that make it difficult to find time for an outdoor walk. TouchGrass is the answer to that problem, and it is the first app of its kind to revolutionize outdoor engagement.

What it does

TouchGrass is an outdoor engagement app that incentivizes regular outdoor excursions with daily challenges, streaks, leaderboards, XP, mascots, badges, and, most importantly, daily journals and map memories. These features are implemented inside a seamless user interface with delightful themes and backgrounds.

How TouchGrass Works:

  1. Open the app, log in, and start your daily challenge.
  2. Go outside and take a photo of your challenge submission.
  3. Verify the photo and write a description of your experience.
  4. Submit the photo and receive XP. The experience can be viewed in the "Map" and "Journal" tabs, meaning the app saves all your precious memories!
  5. Check the "Profile," "Leaderboard," and "Badges" tabs to make sure you're caught up on all the latest advancements.
  6. Check back daily for new challenges and keep going outdoors!

How I built it

The app was built with Claude Code in VS Code, primarily using the Dart programming language for the infrastructure. The build was split into multiple phases centered on the user experience, or UX. Those ten phases were then iterated on, and the scope was refined to better fit TouchGrass.

Challenges I ran into

Getting TouchGrass reliable enough to ship surfaced some hard bugs. After migrating the app to its permanent touchgrass.web.app domain, Google Sign-In broke with a vague "Authentication provider error." Firebase Auth checks the domain a sign-in request comes from against an allowlist, and the new domain hadn't been added yet. The toughest bug lived in the core photo submission flow. When AI verification failed, users could submit their photo manually instead, but that manual path kept throwing a generic error no matter what I tried. I traced it to a genuine security rules bug, fixed it, redeployed, and the error still didn't go away. The real cause turned out to be a known limitation in how Firebase's web SDK handles database transactions in the browser, one that swallows the actual error and replaces it with a meaningless one. The fix was to redesign that part of the app to rely on Firestore's own atomic writes instead of a transaction, which solved the problem for good. I also learned to stop trusting my own assumptions. I once flagged a working API key as invalid just because its format looked off, and only caught the mistake by testing it directly instead of eyeballing it.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

TouchGrass began as an idea I had while taking a walk outdoors. From there, through multiple iterations, it has transformed into an impactful, user-centric app that has the power to change lives. The single biggest accomplishment was opening the app's official website at touchgrass.web.app for the first time and seeing the seamless, user-centric interface combined with its stunning themes and beautiful backgrounds. That is when I realized the idea that began with an evening stroll was on its way to reaching people and helping them experience the benefits of life outdoors.

What I learned

Throughout this project, I built a full-stack app through agentic coding. Using the Claude Code agent let me experiment with the best agentic coding assistant on the market while creating my first-ever app. This would have been an impossible task without agentic coding, and TouchGrass would have remained just a dream without it. That is when I realized the power of AI in the world of app development and how it can be used to create seamless, user-focused experiences. Since I didn't have to focus on the programming side of things, I was able to dedicate my attention solely to the idea and the user experience. This is part of the reason why I believe TouchGrass has such a beautiful, flawlessly operating interface. That said, I still had to understand what went wrong at every step, because there are certain tasks AI cannot complete, and ultimately, TouchGrass is my app, not Claude's.

What's next for TouchGrass

TouchGrass will keep growing on two fronts: AI and community. Photo verification currently runs on-device, and the next step is moving it to a secure server-side pipeline so results can't be spoofed. On the community side, I'm planning local events, group and friend challenges, a deeper achievement system, and eventually native launches on the App Store and Google Play.

The goal stays the same as it was on that first evening walk: make it a little easier for people to step outside and touch grass.

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