GT-3000

After a bad gout flare-up in Istanbul, I started looking for an app to track the things that actually mattered: hydration, food choices, and patterns over time. Everything I found was either too generic or too clinical.

The fastest way to understand behaviour is to design for yourself. GT-3000 started as a personal tool. Version 0.1 was a simple water tracker with a 3-litre daily goal and a countdown showing how many hours remained in the day. As I used it, I realised hydration only told part of the story. Version 0.5 introduced food logging, meal photos, and a calendar view for spotting patterns over time.

The first version of GT-3000 used a single streak counter. The problem was that you could log a terrible day and still keep the streak alive. It rewarded logging, not outcomes.

I redesigned the experience around two signals: a Daily Streak for consistency and a Today's Status rating of Clean, Mixed, or Heavy based on food and hydration.

Supporting cards for Water, Liquids, and Food show what contributed to the result, while a separate reward system unlocks after three consecutive Clean days.

The result is a system that rewards better habits, not just app usage.

Testing surfaced a clear behaviour pattern: people largely ignored the full logging flow and gravitated toward the quick actions on the home screen.

The design response was instant logging. Water, food, and liquids were condensed into single-tap actions that could be completed in seconds.

Meal times are detected automatically from the device clock, removing another decision from the process. Food severity was reduced to three levels because anything more detailed slowed people down. The reward system followed the same principle: three Clean days unlock a random treat. Claim it, reset, repeat.

Apple rejected Build 9 almost instantly.

Words like "Risk", "Flare", and anything that sounded vaguely medical were flagged under Guideline 1.4.1. Build 10 became less about functionality and more about framing.

"RISK TODAY" became "TODAY'S STATUS". High / Med / Low became Heavy / Mixed / Clean. "Track Your Gout" became "Track Your Day". The app itself became GT-3000: Diet & Habit Tracker.

The rejection also exposed unnecessary complexity. The reward system had quietly grown into wallets, ticket counts, cooldowns, and stacked rewards. It became: three Clean days, unlock a treat, claim it, reset. I even found an unfinished "Log a Flare" feature still sitting in the codebase after six builds.

One friction point I identified early was that GT-3000's hydration reminders were too generic. Every notification said the same thing regardless of what had already been logged.

I redesigned the notification system to be progress-aware. Each reminder checks the user's current intake and adjusts the message accordingly. Someone who hasn't logged any water receives a different prompt from someone who is already close to their daily goal.

I also introduced time-of-day variation so reminders feel fresh rather than repetitive. The result is a notification system that feels contextual and useful rather than another notification to ignore.

Building the entire product closed a gap I hadn't fully appreciated from the design side. Features that feel simple in a prototype become much more complex in production. Notifications alone introduced permission flows, scheduling edge cases, and platform constraints I never had to think about in Figma.

More importantly, shipping exposed assumptions. The original streak rewarded logging instead of outcomes. Users consistently preferred simpler interactions over richer ones. And Apple's rejection improved the product by forcing me to focus on behaviours rather than medical language.

GT-3000 is live on the App Store and still something I use every day.