JCI — Just Checking In

The Challenge

In the mental wellness space, friction is the enemy. The founders of Just Checking In (JCI) had a behavioral science framework designed to help users track their daily emotional well-being and stay accountable to their support networks.

They needed a cross-platform mobile app (iOS and Android) that was calming, beautifully designed, and simple enough to use in under 30 seconds a day. Their previous technical co-founder had spent months spinning their wheels on a native iOS build without shipping a single working prototype.

They needed a reset, and they needed it fast.

The Solution

By leveraging React Native and a unified cross-platform architecture, I designed, built, and shipped the fully functional JCI app to TestFlight and Google Play internal testing.

Key Features Delivered

• Frictionless Daily Logging: A gesture-based UI allowing users to log their mood, energy levels, and daily notes in seconds.
• Accountability Circles: A secure "buddy system" allowing users to share their check-ins with trusted friends or therapists, triggering automated alerts if a user missed check-ins.
• Data Visualization: Beautiful, accessible charts tracking emotional trends over weeks and months to help users identify behavioral patterns.
• Cross-Platform Parity: A single, clean TypeScript codebase that compiled natively to both iOS and Android, ensuring identical feature sets and zero duplicated effort.

Engineering

• Tests: Check-in flow and accountability-alert paths covered before TestFlight / Play internal testing.
• CI/CD: Single React Native pipeline producing iOS (TestFlight) and Android (Play internal) builds.
• Security: Private check-in data, opt-in sharing with named circles only, and AWS-backed session auth.
• Deployment: TestFlight and Google Play internal testing from one TypeScript codebase, after months of stalled native work.

The Make Real Difference

When startups try to build for iOS and Android simultaneously using native languages (Swift and Kotlin), they double their costs and halve their speed. By leveraging modern cross-platform tools with deep native expertise, I bypassed the friction completely.

I didn't just write code—I helped them rethink their core user flow to reduce the number of taps required to complete a check-in, fundamentally improving the product's retention metrics.