How to build a mobile app in 2025 | Starter Story

When Patrik Edén set out to build a habit-tracking app in the summer of 2022, he made a series of deliberate choices that would determine everything about the product's trajectory. He chose Flutter, a cross-platform framework, so a single codebase could deploy to both iOS and Android. He focused the MVP on a single core feature: a tile-based grid chart for visualizing habit progress, with a clean, simple interface. And he made a radical privacy decision: all data would be stored locally on the device, with no sign-in, no authentication, and no server. "The users have complete control over the data," he explains. That last choice, in particular, would become the defining architecture of the app, shaping not just how it worked but how it felt to use.

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