I've killed more houseplants than I'd like to admit. Not from neglect exactly — from the specific, stupid way I neglect them: I water everything on the same day because I can't keep track of which plant wants what, so half of them rot and the other half go thirsty.
So a few months ago I started building GrowBook. A plant care tracker. Flutter, offline-first, Android first.
I know. There are already a hundred plant apps. I want to be honest about why I built another one instead of just downloading one of those.
I tried them. The good-looking ones are subscription walls with a plant drawing on top — you can't add a second plant without paying. The free ones drown you in a feed and a shop and "plant coins." And almost all of them assume you're online, all the time, which is a weird assumption for an app whose entire job is to remind you to do a thing at home.
What I actually wanted was small and boring:
- A list of my plants with a photo of each real one, not a stock image of the species.
- Per-plant watering / fertilizing / pruning schedules, because my snake plant and my fern do not live on the same clock.
- A reminder that actually fires, even with no internet, even after I reboot my phone.
- The whole thing usable without an account. Cloud sync should be a thing I opt into, not the price of entry.
That last point turned into the spine of the whole architecture. GrowBook is offline-first: everything lives in a local SQLite database (I'm using Drift), and the app is fully functional before you've ever seen a login screen. Sync to the cloud is a feature you turn on, not a wall you climb over.
I'm building this mostly solo, and I want to do it in the open — including the parts that go wrong, which so far is most of them. The next few posts are going to be very specific: the week I lost to Android's notification system, the light sensor Flutter refused to read, the AI plant identifier I had to rip out and rebuild. Real bugs, real dead ends.
Where I'm at right now, honestly:
- Users: 0
- Revenue: $0
- Plants kept alive by the app: a suspiciously healthy count, but I'm the developer, so I don't count.
If you keep plants: what's the one thing every plant app you've tried gets wrong for you? I'd rather build from your annoyance than my assumptions.
— building GrowBook in public, #1
