So even though I work at a games studio, I don't consider myself to have actually released a 'professional' program yet as I joined Rare in 2019 and Sea of Thieves was released in 2018. Even though my name is in the credits, I don't really count it as I wasn't there for the official launch, nor did I contribute any code to initial codebase.
I did upload a terrible web 'game' to itch a few years ago but I don't count that either.
[Background]
At the tail end of 2025, I was in and out of doctor appointments and had an MRI and a colonoscopy due to high levels of inflammation in my bowels. I was dreading the worse case scenario over the months. My older brother was diagnosed with Crohn's disease when he was 18 (he's now 38), and doctors diagnosed me with it when I was 21 along with Coeliac disease when I started displaying similar symptoms.
For the past 14 years I have been avoiding gluten like the plague as well as the same foods that trigger my brother (that includes high fibre foods). I have been fortunate that my symptoms have not been as aggressive as my brothers. Statistics say people with Crohn's double their risk of bowel cancer every 10 years.
The results of the MRI and colonoscopy came back with; all clear. No Crohn's and the consultant even said I have 'great looking bowels'. I was extremely confused as Crohn's is incurable. They never actually did any tests when I was 21, doctors at the time just said it was Crohn's because you're 70% more likely to develop it if you have a direct relative with it. Also, Coeliac disease heavily imitates Crohn's...
I was 'demoted' to IBS. Either way, bowel cancer is no joke. My colonoscopy was on the 29th December 2025 and I vowed that one of my new years resolutions would be to eat the NHS recommended 30g of fibre a day as I did not want to have another colonoscopy in the future.
[The App]
Enter MacroTracker9000. The name started off as a joke (and has now been relegated to the debug name of the app), but I wanted a macro tracker that I could control that didn't require an account or network connectivity. I wanted to be able to edit it and add features as I went along. I've tried using the food tracking in the FitBit app and hated it as it's very 'American' focused, as is MyFitnessPal.
I chose Flutter and Dart as I hate Java. Flutter's state system is really jank and disgusting but at least Dart is syntactically similar to C++. As much as I'm not a fan of the languages, they are super fast to iterate heavy UI apps in and you get cross-platform compilation out of the box.
I've been using Android Studio to make the app as I kind of hate Visual Studio Code and Android Studio is so much better than it used to be. I was using it during my degree to make an android app in Java and it was so clunky and difficult to use. It's not Visual Studio but I'll take it.
[Google Play]
What a nightmare. I originally tried releasing back in March and setting up a play developer account is a task and a half. I then got to uploading to the internal testing track where I saw the apps store front page for the first time and noticed that it was displaying my full legal name and legal address in the "about the developer" section. Google says they do this to prevent fraud if you are acting as a sole trader, even though there's no UK requirement for them to do this but they just do it across the board. I was not happy about this and tried to change my address using a legal document with a different address on it but Google just sent me round 5 different departments collecting support ID's. I eventually ended up with a guy called 'Alvin' who said he was 'liaising with a specialist department' but still heard nothing after 2 months, even though I was chasing Alvin up every week for an update.
I eventually ended up paying £200 to create a limited company, a private email address, get a new sim card for my old phone, paid a business in London to use their address and set up a business banking account with Natwest. The upside to all this is that business Google Play developer accounts don't need to do a 2 week testing period with 12 testers when launching a new app for the first time and I just released it when I was ready.
[Release]
I released it on a Sunday afternoon. Every post I had read said it would take Google anywhere up to 2 weeks to get round to reviewing a new app so I sent it for review thinking I'd hear something in a couple of weeks, it then went live 10 minutes later. It was kind of anti-climactic.
There's still loads of features I've got on my Trello board and I tend to spend a weekend a month now working on it. I'd really like the ability to create more trackers inside the app like daily push-ups or habit tracking like 30 minutes of writing. With how Flutter's nesting of widgets work, I've already got things like "Daily summary card" and "Calendar View" as separate reusable widgets, so it shouldn't be difficult to create a page where users can select what widgets they want displayed on the page and where and what they should contain.
Everything in the app exports to a plain JSON file so writing out new custom information is incredibly easy.
Its now also got me thinking about making other apps, mainly a clone of a game I hate called Township. I am somewhat addicted to it but I also loathe it with every fibre of being and curse the developers everytime I lose my super rainbow ball after I've just got it back.
It's times like these I really love being a developer. I can just make the shit I want to use and then not worry about the company pushing updates that changes the thing I loved about the app.
[TrackWell]
You can find it on the Google Play Store here:
It's free to track food, water and recipes. It does have a 'premium' version that's £3.49 that includes some other things but it's a one-off payment that will include any other premium updates. I tried my best to make this app completely offline with zero permissions requested. Due to the premium billing, it's ended up with a permission on network connectivity (as it needs to connect to the internet to check your play account to see if you've purchased premium) but it silently fails if there's no internet and the app will continue to work just fine.
You don't need an account (you can't even create one anyway) and everything is stored locally on the phone. You back up the data by exporting it to a JSON file. I tend to save mine to OneDrive. Until you export it, it's stored in a binary format that only the app can access. Exporting simply creates a zip folder of JSON files and then hands that over to the OS and lets the OS handle saving it somewhere so the app itself doesn't need a permission on accessing your memory.
My favourite features are the 5 a day tracker and the weekly/monthly overviews for all my macros. If I've overeaten one week, it allows me to course correct over the month and even myself back out. I've also never been below 20g of fibre a day this year. I never realised how difficult it is to hit 30g of fibre and 5 a day and 100g of protein and stay below 20g of saturated fat. It's genuinely changed how I view food and what I decide to eat.
I'm pretty proud that I managed to stick with something and get it officially released. I also own my own company now, so that's cool I guess.
