Wander Wonders

Wander Tracking
Wander in Progress
Home and Garden
Bag/Pocket where items are kept
Pressbook
Shop
Settings Page
Meta Display AR App
Dynamic Island
Lock Screen Widget

It's 6 p.m. You've been inside for nine hours. You know a walk would help. But the app that's supposed to get you moving is waiting with a broken streak, a missed goal, and a little red badge of shame. So you stay on the couch.

That app thinks guilt is a feature. We built the opposite.

Wander Wonders is a walking app that is physically incapable of punishing you. Take a short walk near a park, and you come home with a seasonal flower. Arrange it in a vase. Watch it bloom for a few days. Then it presses itself into a permanent Pressbook, stamped with the date you first discovered that species. The walk is the input; beauty, not metrics, is the reward.

Inspiration

Wellness apps overwhelmingly bet on streaks, targets, and scolding notifications. For many people that doesn't motivate — it just adds one more thing to feel bad about, until they delete the app because it made walking feel like debt. We wanted to know: if you remove every punishment, every number to chase, every reason to feel behind, can gentleness get someone out the door? Cozy games and flower pressing became the answer: collect something lovely, bring it home, keep it forever.

What it does

Tap 'Start Wander' near a park. At 10, 20, and 30 minutes, you choose from three seasonal flowers. A full walk brings all three home. Flowers bloom for days in your vases, then naturally press into your Pressbook. You can press a favorite early, sell one, or spend a little sunshine to keep one alive another day. Your daily steps quietly become Glow. Every 100 steps earn 1 Glow, the currency for vases and sunshine.

No streaks. No leaderboards. Going away for three weeks? Hibernate freezes every flower exactly as you left it.

When the app is minimized, live activities integration make sure that you get a snapshot of your progress in both your lock screen and the iOS dynamic island.

An AR prototype is also included, built with the Meta Wearables SDK, that allows you to see your progress as you walk, and collect glow in the real world.

The design philosophy

What we're proudest of: every gentle promise became a hard engineering rule.

Reward, never punish. User retention comes from attachment (first-discovery dates, a growing collection), not fear.

Trust the player: "near a park" means within half a mile, and if GPS fails or you decline the permission, a simple "I'm walking near a park" tap earns identical rewards. It's not a competition; trusting people costs nothing and includes everyone.

Privacy: one location fix per walk, checked against Apple Maps on the server, then discarded with the response. No routes, no coordinates, no park names, no raw health data ever touch the database.

How we built it

One rule: the phone renders, the server decides. A SwiftUI iPhone app (with offline support and Apple + Google sign-in) talks to a Supabase Postgres backend where every economy action — flower awards, sale prices, step credit — is a server-authoritative, idempotent operation the client can't forge. A Deno edge function signs Apple Maps Server API tokens for the park check, and SQL test suites guard the schema and game rules. During the hackathon window this went from working baseline to shipped: production backend deployed, UI redesigned, and a signed TestFlight build running on a real iPhone.

Challenges

Verifying "near a park" without building a tracker. Logging walk locations would poison the whole premise. The park check became a piece of data whose entire lifetime is one HTTP request. Designing for deliberate forgetting turned out to be harder than designing for storage.

Being generous without double-paying. Walks end in network dead zones; steps arrive late from an Apple Watch. Every reward rides on idempotency keys and daily high-water marks, so syncing twice can never duplicate a flower and switching step sources will not result in free Glow.

What we learned

Kindness and motivation is a systems problem.

What's next

A 4–6 week free beta with 30–50 indoor workers, measured by one north star: did this app get a person outside for ten minutes this week? The business core loop is free forever, optional one-time cosmetics. V2 will add an AI companion and will link the AR prototype to actual app progress.

Wander Wonders will never ask if you hit your goal. It just asks, softly: did you go outside today? Bring something new home.