A maintenance reminder app for Norwegian homes. It knows what a house, a cabin or a flat needs, and when: the outdoor tap closes in October, not July. Every one of its 45 tasks names the Norwegian authority the advice came from, and links to the page. One notification, Saturday at 09:00, before the deadline rather than on it. A logbook with photos, exportable as PDF or as a backup file you carry to a new phone. No account, no login, no tracking. Norwegian only, iOS only.
Maker here. Fair warning before you click: this app is in Norwegian, for Norway,
and you probably cannot use it. I am posting it anyway because the part I would
want to read about is how it is built, not what it does.
Norwegian homes have a maintenance problem that is not difficulty — it is
forgetting. Close the outdoor tap before the first frost or you get a burst pipe.
Test the RCD. Clean the bathroom drain. Nobody remembers, and the advice online
is a soup of blog posts repeating each other.
So the rule I set was that the app is never allowed to invent advice. All 45
tasks name the Norwegian authority they came from — the fire safety association,
the electrical safety portal, the homeowners' association, the building
authority — and link to the page. Where a recommended interval comes from a
source, the sentence appears in the app word for word, with the organisation
underneath. 29 of the 45 are sourced that way. The other 16 say, on the screen,
that the number is our own judgement.
Two things fell out of that which I did not expect.
The first is that writing the article for a task is what finds the bugs. One
task told people to store a robot mower battery fully charged, the exact
opposite of what its source says. No test would ever have caught that. Now the
task and its article have to be written in the same change.
The second is the notification. The app is opened about a dozen times a year, so
for most of its life it is one line on a lock screen. A reminder about roof
gutters at 09:00 on a Tuesday reaches someone at work: read, filed under "yes,
this weekend", forgotten. So reminders fire on the Saturday *before* the
deadline, grouped into one line per home. A seasonal deadline is set by the
weather, so early is fine and late is a burst pipe.
No account, no login, no analytics, no SDK, "Data Not Collected" on the privacy
label, which also meant no RevenueCat. Homes, logbook and photos never leave the
device. The logbook, the PDF export and a backup file you can carry to a new
phone are all free, because the one thing a ten-year maintenance record has to
survive is me shutting down.
Happy to answer anything about the sourcing pipeline, the notification
scheduling, or what it is like shipping a single-market app in a language
nobody on this site reads.