Last Tuesday the kitchen tap started dripping. Not a lot. Just one drip every four seconds or so. Annoying, not alarming. The kind of thing you notice, mentally file under “weekend,” and then forget about for three weeks until it’s dripping onto the floor and you’ve got a puddle forming near the dishwasher. I did what any sysadmin does. I didn’t fix it. I investigated it. ...
I had a problem. My dad had dementia. He couldn’t remember if he’d taken his pills. He couldn’t remember what day it was. He couldn’t reliably use the phone he’d been using for a decade. I looked at the App Store. I found 47 medication reminder apps. Every single one of them had: user accounts, push notification permissions, onboarding flows, settings screens, cloud sync, subscription upsells. Not one of them was: open the app, tap green when you’ve taken your pill, done. So I built Buddy. And I kept running into the same reaction from everyone I showed it to: “why doesn’t this already exist?” That’s the question behind this post. ...