I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

# Summary After trying dozens of existing habit-tracking apps, a developer and his wife found none that met their specific needs—including a single long list view, local-only data storage, custom emoji support, flexible goal-setting options, occurrence counting, and reminder features. Despite the assumption that AI would make building such an app simple, the developer discovered through a year-long project that creating a functional app required far more work than AI prompts alone could deliver. The article documents why existing apps like Streaks and HabitKit fell short and sets up his experience building a custom solution.