I built an iPhone app that is now available in the App Store. Its purpose is to make it easy and effective to use intermittent positive reinforcement as a motivation tool - the psychological phenomenon behind doom-scrolling, gambling, and animal training, now finally purposed for your benefit. It provides the tools to manage the little treats your brain needs to move in the right direction, combined with gamification designed to support your journey and encourage healthy usage.

This is the outgrowth of a “scratch your own itch” project when I learned about how variable reward schedules and wanted to be able to use it to break through times of lower motivation. While simpler alternatives like rolling a (virtual) d20 worked to prove the concept, there was a lot of room for improvement. There’s a system for dynamically weighting outcomes inspired by how RNG-heavy video games avoid big streaks of wins/losses. The other big idea was building anticipation into the app itself in the form of gamification so even if your rewards themselves aren’t really getting you into the right headspace at some time, there’s something to work towards in-app to add an extra boost.

SwiftUI for presentation, Rust for business logic in case it ever pencils out business-wise to port to another platform. If I was doing it again starting today, I would probably do React Native for the UI, but the integration story with Rust was pretty weak when I was evaluating options (they work together well enough now, and I have another project combining them, but not able to justify a UI rewrite yet).

CTA: this is a niche product in a (currently) non-existent market category. I’m starving for feedback, so if you have opinions about the app or even just the problem space, please let me know (comments here, App Support link from App Store, or messages to TantalusPath on social media), and I’ll eat it up!

TantalusPath https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tantaluspath/id6504832898