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Mobile App
DingBit — Pavlovian Habit Building for iPhone & Apple Watch
A native iOS and Apple Watch app I built to make habits automatic through classical conditioning. You schedule a 'ding' for a small action — breathe, stretch, drink water — and when the sound fires you do the thing. Over enough repetitions the cue triggers the habit by itself. Built in Swift and SwiftUI with SwiftData for local-first storage, WatchConnectivity for equal-priority phone/watch sync, and StoreKit 2 for the freemium tier. Nothing leaves the device — no accounts, no cloud, no backend — so the conditioning loop stays reliable and private. Shipped to the App Store in April 2026.
Key features
- Schedule recurring 'dings' at custom intervals — the core conditioning cue with reliable delivery whether the app is open or backgrounded
- Equal-priority Apple Watch companion — complete a habit from the wrist and the delivered notification clears on the phone instantly, no iPhone required to log completions
- Interactive notification actions — 'Done' and 'In 5 mins' snooze directly from the lock screen without opening the app
- Per-habit reward sounds with AVAudioSession management — pick a different audio cue for each habit so the brain learns to associate each one distinctly
- Streak tracking and daily consistency view — a calendar heatmap and per-habit detail stats surface how well the conditioning is taking
- Freemium tier with StoreKit 2 — 3 habits free, unlimited on supporter, with a 7-day grace period before premium features revert after a lapsed subscription
- Local-first and account-free — everything persists via SwiftData on-device, no cloud, no sign-in, no analytics SDK, no data leaving the phone
- Haptic feedback integrated with the ding — on the watch the haptic arrives with the sound so the cue works even without audio
- Soft-prompt onboarding for notification permission — primes the user before the system dialog so a rushed tap doesn't permanently deny the app's core mechanic
Technologies
SwiftSwiftUISwiftDataWatchConnectivityUserNotificationsStoreKit 2AVFoundationwatchOS
About the project
DingBit started as a personal experiment. During long work sessions I kept catching myself tense and dehydrated — and knowing better never translated into doing better. So I built a conditioning loop instead: a scheduled chime, a small action, and enough repetitions that the cue starts triggering the habit on its own. Classic Pavlov, applied to shoulder tension and water intake.
Turning the experiment into a product meant solving the unglamorous parts: notification delivery that survives backgrounding, an Apple Watch companion with equal priority — complete a habit from the wrist and the phone syncs instantly — per-habit sounds plus up to 8 distinct haptic patterns so each cue stays distinguishable, and streak tracking with a calendar heatmap to show whether the conditioning is actually taking.
The architecture is deliberately local-first: SwiftData on-device, WatchConnectivity for sync, StoreKit 2 for the freemium tier. No accounts, no cloud, no analytics SDK — nothing leaves the phone, which keeps the loop both private and reliable.
DingBit shipped to the App Store in April 2026. It's free to use, with a supporter tier that unlocks purely aesthetic extras.
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