2025
Homie
Family chores. Points, levels, weekly Captain. iOS.
- Launched in
- 2 months
- Live for
- 1 year
On this page
Context
Where this lives in the world.
Homie turns household chores into a family game. Tasks earn points, points become levels, the highest scorer of the week becomes Cleaning Captain. Multi-channel chat (general / direct / group) keeps conversation flowing alongside the rotation.
Challenge
What was hard about it.
Real-time multi-household membership, mobile-grade chat performance, and a sustainable subscription model — all on a single iOS-first codebase that ships from one EAS build pipeline.
Solution
What we built to solve it.
NestJS + Prisma + Socket.io on the API; React Native 0.81 + Expo SDK 54 on mobile. Game economy is currency-agnostic so a household can run on points, dollars, or chocolate. Chat uses materialized views for unread counts so message-list opens stay sub-100ms even on year-old phones. Premium tier ($4.99/mo) routed through RevenueCat.
Tech story
Decisions worth calling out.
- Materialized views for unread chat counts — Postgres handles the aggregation, the app reads a single number
- Optimistic locking on task completion — race conditions between two parents claiming the same chore resolve cleanly
- Multi-household model — a user can belong to multiple homes simultaneously (parents who share custody, etc.)
- Real-time Socket.io events with backoff and reconnect — works on flaky mobile networks
- EAS-signed iOS builds — single command pushes a TestFlight or App Store update
Screenshots
What it looks like in flight.
Outcome
TestFlight + App Store · premium tier live
Looking to build something like this?
If you're sitting on a similar problem — multi-currency booking, clinical workflow, real-time pipelines, anything in this orbit — we've already done the hard parts once. The second time is faster, cheaper, and shaped to your business. Tell us what you have in mind.