TL;DR Our weekly step competition app has opinions. Get it here

Steps pits you against your friends in the simplest ever weekly step count competition

It started life as an app for us Apple Watch fans in the office to tally our steps and compete with our Fitbit… friends

Then I wanted to learn how to put a server in the cloud and make the steps beam up and back down onto everyone’s iPhones. I started on glitch.com and made the roughest, quickest, dirtiest bit of code I could write. And it worked! Not just technically, but we actually started using it to compete with each other. Everyone got in on it

We even wrote an Apple TV app to broadcast the live results of our game

Josh, our designer, made a great icon

Unsung, our iOS developer, made our 3D button code

And then John and Dylan, our people who actually know what a cloud is (what is it?) helped me make the server properly using CloudKit

Ground rules

I had rules about how this app had to be

First: No analytics

I was often advised by our cloud gurus to, “Use Firebase. It’s so much easier than CloudKit.” While that is very true (oh my god it’s so true), the convenience meant handing over our users’ data, and who knows what else, to Google. I wasn’t prepared to ask our users to do that and I wasn’t prepared to do it without their permission. However few of them there were going to be

Users had already decided whether they were opting-in to analytics when they set up their iPhones. To respect that choice there would be no tracking

Bold choices

This app had to be simple. I didn’t want sign-in, but I wanted a multiplayer experience. I didn’t want features, I wanted fun

Let’s take a look at the on-boarding screens in Steps. Each one clearly explains its value to you. The button to make it go away is big and bright