You Become

Daily thoughts for who you want to become. A beautifully crafted iPhone and iPad app with personalized inspiration, meaningful widgets, and small moments of encouragement throughout your day.

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Inspiration

I wanted to create something people would enjoy opening, even if they only had a minute.

A few well-chosen words can offer a different perspective or help you take a small step forward. But I wanted You Become to feel more personal than a collection of random quotes. The starting point became a simple question: Who do you want to become?

More confident? Calmer? More grateful? That choice shapes the thoughts you see.

The experience mattered just as much as the words. I wanted beautiful typography, softly blended colors and gentle motion to make opening the app feel like a small, welcome pause in the day.

What it does

You Become is a native iPhone and iPad app with daily thoughts chosen around the areas users want to grow in.

Users can explore a personalized feed, save their favorite thoughts and share them as beautifully rendered images. Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets bring those thoughts into everyday moments, while optional reminders deliver a thought at a chosen time.

The feed prioritizes unseen content to reduce repetition, and the thought library works offline from the first launch. There is no account to create.

The Journey page celebrates consistency through streaks and milestones. Premium unlocks unlimited browsing and lets users blend up to three growth areas into one feed.

How I built it

I built You Become in SwiftUI with help from Codex, using WidgetKit and App Intents for widgets.

RevenueCat handles subscription purchases, restoration and Premium entitlement management, working with Apple's in-app purchase system. I kept the paywalls custom so the subscription experience would feel consistent with the rest of the app.

Supabase manages the thought library, categories and category symbols. A bundled content snapshot makes the first launch work offline. Published updates are downloaded and stored locally, allowing the library to evolve without requiring a new app release.

The interface uses custom typography, coordinated color palettes and native Liquid Glass on supported devices, with a separate appearance for older iOS versions.

AI tools helped me develop and iterate, but the final experience came from hands-on design decisions, testing on physical devices and many rounds of refinement.

Challenges I ran into

Getting the scrolling right took more work than I expected. Even a brief pause or an abrupt transition could interrupt the experience. I repeatedly refined the motion, responsiveness and background transitions until they felt natural together.

Widgets presented another challenge: a thought that fits beautifully in the app may be too long for a small widget. Different sizes needed careful content selection and typography. Tapping a widget also needed to open the matching thought without a distracting scroll through the feed.

The writing required just as much attention. Early drafts sometimes felt complicated or repetitive. I reviewed and revised the library to make the thoughts more natural, understandable and useful.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of how consistent the app feels, from the first welcome screen to a thought on someone's Home Screen.

Details such as responsive selection buttons, gentle haptics, animated milestones and carefully composed sharing images took many iterations. Individually they are small, but together they make the app feel considered and pleasant to use.

My goal was not to promise an overnight transformation. It was to create a welcoming space for encouragement, reflection and perspective, shaped around who each person wants to become.

What I learned

I learned how much work sits behind an interface that looks simple.

You Become often shows just a thought, a background and a few controls. Making that feel effortless meant getting content selection, local storage, animations, widgets and navigation to work well together.

I also learned that removing something can improve an app as much as adding a feature. Simpler writing, fewer distractions and clearer choices often made the biggest difference.

What's next for You Become

Now that You Become is available, I want to learn from the people using it: which thoughts resonate, which growth areas they would like to see and what makes the app worth returning to.

I plan to keep expanding the carefully reviewed library, refine personalization and widgets, and explore additional languages while preserving the natural tone of the writing.

Above all, I want future updates to preserve its simplicity and make the everyday experience better, not more complicated.

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