Roomly: Split chores at home

If a task belongs to everyone, nobody feels it's theirs to start.

So Roomly doesn't leave chores open to the whole home: each person gets one task per day, and the tasks rotate automatically. A shared chore becomes one person's job, today, instead of everyone's job in general.

To make it last, the app relies on gamification, meaning mechanics borrowed from games. Every day you do your task, you earn a streak, which comes as a cloth, the app's small virtual currency. Each roommate's streaks add up into a shared pot, which then unlocks rewards the group picks for itself: a restaurant together, a night off dishes. Streaks aren't the point in themselves: they just give a concrete reason to do your task today rather than tomorrow.

It's not a blind bet: Duolingo, the reference for streaks, has published figures.

The group effect matters too: learners with at least one streak shared with a friend are 22% more likely to complete their daily lesson, the same logic as Roomly's shared pot.

Everything in the app serves one loop.

A feature that broke it had to go: I'd built an option to spend streaks to hand your task to a roommate. On paper it met a real need, but a habit only forms if everyone does their own task, day after day: if you can always pay to get out of it, it's a trade, not a habit. It never left my test build.

On the build side, the workflow fits in one sentence: Figma to draw the screens, Xcode and SwiftUI to build them, and AI as a coding partner throughout the project to turn each mockup into a working screen.

Firebase syncs tasks in real time between every member of the same home, and Superwall shows the subscription offer at key moments: right after onboarding, a week later, or the first time someone opens the rewards.

To make those moments stand out, a diagonal shine regularly sweeps across the elements meant to convert, like the paywall button or the reward cards: it catches the eye without being pushy and feels more polished.

Small details like this matter: how an offer is presented moves the numbers. Superwall's analysis of onboarding paywalls shows it.

The app runs on three main screens.

• Home shows the task you need to do today and your roommates' tasks, and it's where you collect your daily streak.
• Cards shows upcoming tasks, lets you add new ones and has a leaderboard between roommates: longest streak, most tasks done, fastest.
• Account holds the settings, your groups and a shareable code to invite new people.

Push notifications keep the app alive even when it's closed, with four reminders:

• One to collect your streak.
• One when a new task is waiting.
• One when you're running out of time for today's task.
• One when a roommate has just finished theirs.

To make it concrete, picture four friends sharing an apartment, exactly the kind of place that inspired Roomly.

Setting up

One of them downloads the app and creates the group for the home at the end of onboarding, then shares an invite code: the others download Roomly and join with it.

Day to day

Everyone gets their tasks, dishes on Monday for one, trash on Tuesday for another, and finishing a task earns a streak. All the streaks together fill the group's pot, and a few weeks later it unlocks the reward the group set for itself, say a Friday night dinner.

When someone forgets

If someone forgets their task, nobody has to point it out: they just don't collect their streak that day.

Tasks are assigned by automatic rotation: nobody has to split them at the start of the week. The dishes simply move to the next person, the trash to the one after.

Before settling on a direction, I benchmarked a lot of organizer apps.

Most looked efficient, but not fun, as if that side had been taken out. I took that angle: an organizer app that is fun to open, carried through the shapes and animations of the UI, all meant to feel light rather than administrative.

Two typefaces share the work: a condensed one for numbers and anything that needs weight, like the streak counter or a reward's price, and a rounder one for sentences. Serious about the numbers, warm about the rest.

The illustrations went through two tools on purpose: a first AI turns a loose idea into a precise brief (style, palette, composition, format), and a second, which was better at the time at generating consistent images, creates the illustration from that brief. Splitting the brief from the image generation is what really made the difference.