We shipped 822 animations. Analytics said one had played once — in the app's entire history.

Solo dev here. We hand-made 137 animation groups per species, six species, 5,242 frames, for a habit app where the progress bar is a pixel pet.

Then our founder said: we made all those special animations and I never see a single one.

I assumed he was wrong. He wasn't. signature_move_played had fired once — in the app's entire history. The cause was arithmetic, not art: a pool weight of 8 out of 108 with a selector ticking every 7 seconds meant a ~90 second expected wait. Our median session is 59.5 seconds. We had built twelve animations that a typical session could not reach.

Fixing it surfaced four more defects. But the one that still bothers me is meta: our own detectors produced ten false alarms during the work.

A contact sheet rescaled five different canvas sizes into one tile and made three healthy stages look broken. A motion threshold called sleep and breathe weak — being still is exactly what those animations are for. A yawn was flagged as 12x too small because a silhouette cannot see a beak opening. Each one would have cost real production time.

The rule we wrote down afterwards: a detector's output is not a finding until the detector has been run against a known-good sample.

Curious what other makers here measured that turned out to be measuring nothing.