I've spent the last months building wisst, a mobile app for short articles with one idea each. It's in closed testing on Google Play now, and I need people to install it and use it for two weeks.
If you've ever shipped an Android app as a solo developer, you know why: Google Play only lets a new personal account into production after at least 12 testers stay in a closed test for 14 days in a row. So this post is part show-and-tell, part honest ask.
The idea
Most feeds reward scrolling. wisst tries to reward understanding.
- One idea per article. 100 to 800 words, a few minutes to read, ending with the one thing the writer wants you to take away.
- A full-screen card for each article. Tap to read, swipe up for the next one.
- You write one sentence before you talk. After reading, you write what you took from it, in your own words, up to 140 characters.
- Then the discussion opens. Only people who read the article and wrote their own sentence take part, so the conversation stays on the idea.
Every sentence you write is kept in your journal, with the month's ideas and topics. If you write articles yourself, you see how each one is doing: who saw it, opened it, finished it, and what readers took from it.
Writing without an audience
A new article starts with readers who chose its topic and reaches more people as they read it to the end. Finishing counts, clicks don't. That means someone with zero followers can still find readers if what they wrote is worth finishing.
You can write it in seven short steps, or just record yourself talking: wisst puts your words into the article's parts, in your own words, and flags anything you didn't actually say.
What isn't there
No ads and no tracking. Politics, news and sport are left out on purpose. There are twelve topics, from science and history to food, language and philosophy. The whole UI works in English and Hebrew (right to left), and each article keeps its own direction.
How it's built
For the curious, since this is dev.to:
-
iOS: SwiftUI, with a design system generated from one
tokens.json(colours, type, spacing, motion) into Swift. - Android: a native Kotlin and Jetpack Compose port, screen by screen, so it feels the same as iOS rather than "the cross-platform version".
- Backend: Supabase. Postgres does most of the work: row-level security decides who can see a discussion, state changes only go through RPCs, and a few hundred database tests run against it on PGlite.
- Feed ranking: a small in-house algorithm that promotes an article by trusted opens and finishes, not by clicks or likes.
- Moderation: a language model checks text against eight published content rules and flags things for a person. It never decides by itself.
- Web: a Cloudflare Worker serves wisst.app, shared article pages and their link previews.
Join the beta (Android)
Three steps, on your phone:
- Join the testers' group with the Gmail account on your phone: https://groups.google.com/g/wisst-beta
- Open the test page and tap to become a tester: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/app.wisst.android
- Install wisst from Google Play, from the same page.
There's also a one-minute walkthrough and more detail at https://wisst.app/beta.
Then, if you have a few minutes this week:
- Read three articles to the end.
- Write a sentence and read the discussion it opens.
- Reply to someone.
- Write, or record, one article of your own. Something you know well is perfect.
Please keep it installed for 14 days. Leaving the test and joining again restarts the count for Google.
iOS comes next. Everyone in the beta is a real person, and what you write is real.
Feedback
I'd love to hear what's confusing, what's broken and what you'd change. Comment here, send feedback from wisst's page on Google Play, or write to support@wisst.app. A screenshot and what you expected to happen help the most.
And if you've been through the 12-testers-for-14-days thing yourself, drop your app in the comments. I'll return the favour.
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