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I’m a father of two young children. After one of my kids fell sick, we had to keep a closer eye on her body temperature and mood to give the doctor more information about her symptoms.
Our current baby app didn’t let us do that. What annoyed me even more was that when I was checking that app, it was giving me pop-ups to push more subscriptions. But I already subscribed?
So I checked… OH MY GOD, one subscription per CHILD?
They want more money from me to add another kid? ಠ_ಠ Geezus.
Isn’t one monthly fee enough? Unsubscribed. But I couldn’t delete the app—they were holding our data hostage! I didn’t know if or when they’d suddenly decide to revoke access.
We ended up just using the Notes app on our iPhones to keep track manually. There had to be a better way; there always is.
In our search, almost every popular app required you to make accounts, be online, and pay upfront or for a subscription.
To make matters worse, I went to check on my weight in a different app. Because you know, parenting == more fat. ㄒoㄒ
This weight tracking app I had was also connected to Bluetooth scales. That company decided that two years was enough, and my Bluetooth scales were no longer supported.
I was expected to buy their new one?!. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
The frustration I felt could rival the spice levels of Mala xiang guo.
So baby tracking, ugh. Weight tracking, ugh.
I also do intermittent fasting (well, I try to). I do 20/4, basically One Meal a Day (OMD)
So this App I'm using to track my Fasting, its main thing was literally a timer. But they wanted to tack on even more engagement features to get you to pay their subscription. Um, no thanks?
Then it occured to me that my data was all over the place. My brain is already all over the place, Facebook knows more about me than my own mother, and Google probably has information on me that I'm probably unaware of.
Could I at least have something in my life where everything was contained?
Gosh darn it! I’m going to make my own app—with blackjack and hookers!
So I did. I made LogTree, sans the blackjack and hookers.
I wanted a simpler app to just log the important things without all the fuss, the upsell, the subscriptions, and waiting for servers to sync.
An app where I could log multiple things of various categories that were important. No fancy content to push or community “features” to drive engagement.
Look, I get it. I’m a product manager by trade. Gotta hit those KPI targets: DAU, MAU, CAC, CTR, ATC, CVR, GMV, CLTV, etc, etc. But you know, something’s gotta give. I don’t need to share my stuff with everyone.
Nah mate, just an app to log my stuff and GTFO. So I can look at it in three months’ time and remind myself what the doctor said about my kid.
Plus, why would I want to have all my children’s personal metrics stored somewhere in the cloud, where I don’t know how secure their policies are?
What if, hidden somewhere in their T&Cs, they sell that data and claim ownership to my child's toys?
I’m not a developer; I never built an app before. So I had to learn from scratch, get this thing up and running so I could use it for my family.
But then I thought, maybe there are some people out there like me who just want to log some things, some of the time, so they can recall it when they need to.
So here it is, LogTree. It’s a fairly simple app—no account creation needed. Just create a folder, select the category for that folder, then log away.
Make more folders for other categories, log some more. Log as much or as little as you want.
But why call it LogTree? and why does it look like it does?
I'm a child of the 90s. My family got our first computer around 1994, pretty sure it was a 486 DX33 or something like that.
XTree Gold was my jam. It was such an amazing program, but I used it mostly for its hex editor, so I could edit save files and give myself infinite files. Or corrupt the file and lose everything.
I learnt the importance of backups and redundancy at a very early age. (´ω｀*)
I know I ranted about apps asking for money—nothing is free. I gotta keep the lights on and feed my kids too, you know.
So while logging everything is free and all your data is stored offline, I added some paid features that were not absolutely necessary, like changing colour themes of the app and visualising your data with charts.
It took almost twice the amount of time to get data visualisation working because data aggregation, date range consideration, and summarisation were needed. It was much more complex than just creating log data.
So for $9.99 USD, you’ll have a lifetime of upgrades on this app, as I plan to add more features like finance logging and a much, much bigger piece that will allow you to create categories yourself to log pretty much anything. All other functions of the app are free forever.
So download the free app now, check it out for yourself.
Let me know what you think; if you have ideas, I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for attending my TED talk.
Cheers,
Cong
https://www.congbakpao.com/