Hi All,

I just released a brand new Breathing Exercise App called breatheX and I'd love to get your reactions and suggestions for how to make this even better.

Background

This App was built completely with SwiftUI in about 5 months while I was learning how to build iOS Apps for the very first time!

Thanks to Paul and this site as well as several other great online resources I was able to research ideas and borrow code fragments ultimately weaving it into something that I wouldn't have believed was possible when I started this journey last summer.

I'm an old "bit flipper" who hadn't coded in almost 40 years (cobol, Fortran & IBM 370 assembler then C on the very first versions of Unix). Then I had moved on to Product Marketing and ultimately started a successful software company and sold it in 1996. So I was way out of the loop on coding but then the COVID lockdown suddenly gave me an urge to play around with iOS development, I started taking some online courses and was getting bored building sample apps so I decided to build something for myself.

Around that same time I had read some books on breathing "The Oxygen Advantage" by Patrick Mckeown and James Nestor's "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art" and I was inspired to start my own daily breathing practice but I couldn't find a really powerful App that was both beautiful and also ran across all the platforms (iPhone, iPad and Watch at least). So I set out to build one for myself using SwiftUI. I wasn't thinking of trying to release it at first but in a matter of about 3-4 weeks I had something running that was actually useful. When I showed it to a few friends they were interested so I set up a beta group. Then I started adding features and polishing the UX and before I knew it I had a reasonable MVP candidate on my hands.

Then I made the mental commitment to go for it and of course that led to many other hurdles beyond coding itself but finally at the end of last year I shipped the first version which I am very happy to see is being reasonably well recieved! I hope you will give it a try and also visit the website www.breathex.io which is almost fully polished with the exception of a short animation video that is in progress as of this moment but the intial 40 secs are there so you can take a peak and see what quality we are shooting at...

Feedback Appreciated

Paul encouraged me to post this app here because I am certainly not done building this App! There are many, many ideas I have with where to take this from here but I would love to hear your general impressions and what I can do to polish the user experience. I would be happy to provide beta access to both versions of the App to this community.

Additional Ideas:

1. I would like to find ways to engage the user in setting up and maintaining a regular breathing practice. I already provide a means of setting up a daily practice goal and provide local notication reminders, I have several logs that users can use to track usage/progress over time but I really want to add some gameification to stimulate regular usage and help users create and maintain a healthy practice over time. Setting goals, tracking progress, creating and maintaining "streaks", earning badges etc. Similar to what Apple does with activity rings.
2. I want to figure out how to collect more sensor data for feedback. Right now I am collecting HR data from the Watch during practice sessions but I would like to figure out how to get more such as HRV and respiratory rate for example but because I am an inexperienced developer at this point I would need help figuring out how best to go about this.
3. I would like to set up a backend cloud service to allow all the users data to be backed up and then be able to be shared/analyzed with a "coach" practioner over the web. Think of it as something similar to TraningPeaks but for people who are tracking breathwork performance indicators such as HR, HRV, VO2 Max etc.

Well if you made it this far THANK YOU for taking the time to read this tome and let me know if you would like to help...

Cheers,

Lou Reynolds lou@peakx.com