A friend and I created Kiwi the Green Koala and a whole cast of characters back in 1999 for a children's book we never figured out how to make. Years later, when the App Store opened up, I turned them into a flashlight app — caught the 2010 flashlight gold rush and got around 300k downloads (mostly in China, still not entirely sure why) before Apple shipped their own flashlight in 2013 and the category got vaporized overnight. The app was Objective-C, I never had time to learn Swift, and Kiwi went into hibernation.
A couple months ago I got the coding bug back, used Claude to ramp on Swift, and rebuilt the thing from scratch. v3 is the version I've wanted to ship for ten years.
What it is now: a cute-character utility app. Flashlight, custom timers, meditation mode, study helper, live activities, notifications that actually fire when they're supposed to. There's also a small AI assistant (Haiku-powered, with COPPA guardrails for younger users) for general questions. Animated characters on the home screen. You can swap the app icon to other characters from the original cast — Kiwi, Taro, Tang, Cheri, Jackfroot, Blueberri.
Not a kids-only app. Built for anyone who likes cute things and needs a timer.
What I'd love feedback on:
- Live Activities — does the timer behave correctly on your lock screen and Dynamic Island?
- Widgets on your Homescreen
- The timer flow — intuitive, or too many steps?
- Timer presets — useful defaults or annoying?
- Pricing — does the freemium split feel fair?
- App icon switcher — does it work cleanly on your iOS version?
- Character art — I redid them in Figma, cut the pieces out for animation with SwiftUI, how's the animation?
- Any general "this feels off" UX notes from a fresh pair of eyes
Less interested in feedback on the AI assistant unless you specifically want to poke at it.
Built solo. Sixteen years on and off. Genuinely excited to have it back. I appreciate it. This is my first ever Reddit Post. be gentle.
The app's website: https://kiwithegreenkoala.com/apps
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