I built an app whose only success metric is how fast you close it

Paul Uhlig — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:52:28 +0000

Most products I've worked on measure success by time-in-app. Fiamo is my attempt at the opposite: a tiny PWA that gives everyone on Earth the same one real-life quest each day — give a stranger an honest compliment, eat one meal without your phone — and once you mark it done, it tells you to close it and go live your life.

The anti-engagement constraints I committed to:

No accounts. An anonymous UUID in localStorage is the whole identity system.
No feed. There is nothing to scroll, by design.
One quest per day, deterministic by UTC date, same for the whole planet.
A live world counter ("N people did today's quest with you") polled from Supabase.
Photos on share cards are composited client-side and never leave the device.
No ads, no trackers, no third-party cookies.

Stack: React PWA on Cloudflare Pages, Supabase (Postgres + RLS) for streaks/counters, service worker with network-first caching. Total hosting cost: €0/month.

What I'd love feedback on from dev.to:

Streak recovery without accounts: from day 3 you can generate a short recovery code (or optionally add an email). Is that enough, or does no-login break down here?
The service worker bit me hard: my first cache-first SW froze old bundles for returning users. Switched to network-first with cache busting — curious how others handle SW update strategies for fast-moving PWAs.
Is 'the app wants you to leave' a real product thesis or just a constraint I fell in love with?

One more thing I'm oddly proud of: every completed quest becomes a permanent petal of a single shared organism — one creature, the same for every eye on Earth. You can't click it bigger; it only grows when someone actually does their quest in the real world. It's my favorite kind of counter: one you can't inflate.

Try it (free, no signup): https://fiamo.pages.dev

Honest teardowns welcome — it's tiny and early, and feedback beats upvotes.

Update, 20 Aug. It went live on Product Hunt this morning: https://www.producthunt.com/products/fiamo

Six hours in: 89 people have opened it, 12 quests marked done. Yesterday those numbers were 58 and 8. Small, but they're the real ones.

One thing the launch already changed: the Chronicle on the Organism page used to round every entry to the full hour, so seven events between 10:03 and 10:59 all showed as "10:00". That was a privacy decision from when there were three users a day, and at this size it just looked broken. Switched it to the minute. It still gives away no id, no name, no content, no quest, no location.

DEV Community: Paul Uhlig

I built an app whose only success metric is how fast you close it