Why I Built an App for My Mom for Christmas
Sometimes my mom gets really annoying. We have a rock-solid relationship but when she calls me and asks non-stop questions about my life, it gets pretty tiresome. Everything she said just made me roll my eyes and occasionally I was tempted to hang up the phone.
So I did what any young techie does to solve their problems. I googled it.
Surprisingly, I found a blog post where a mom wrote about how she felt she was really annoying to her daughter and asked her audience for advice.
Even more surprisingly, many of the comments were actually from the perspective of children. And one comment in particular stood out to me:
“I wish my mom was still here to annoy me”
For some reason that comment has stayed in my mind since then. It’s been a constant reminder that that day will eventually come and I would give anything to have my mom call me again. Anything.
So I try to do the little things to show my mom I love her even though we are living apart. I call and FaceTime her when I can. I reply and smile even when the questions get really annoying (treating her like an actual human being, such a new concept!). I even send her the occasional selfie because when’s the last time she saw what I looked like? A couple of months ago? Compared to seeing me every day for 18 years, that’s a big change.
A Dedicated Mom App
My mom recently got an iPhone so I wanted to take this one step further. I decided to build her a dedicated app, just to talk to me.
I’ve been learning iOS and Swift the past few months and the best way to learn is to build something. This was made significantly easier thanks to the Layer SDK, it made building messaging really simple.
I wanted the app to do 3 things:
- Easier Communication: 1-to-1 messaging with read receipts and likes. I don’t mind read receipts turned on just for my mom and likes are an easy satisfying reply to most types of messages.
- Safe and comforting: Limited location sharing to give my mom a peace of mind that yes, I’m still alive. To let her know if I’m home and I moved today.
- Passive memory sharing: Most of my memories are captured through my photos, location data, Facebook and Twitter posts. I wanted to be able to passively share this already-made content with my mom but filterable, so I came up with the idea of Tinder-style cards where I can swipe left or right to share these bite-sized “diary entries” with her.
When I gave the app to my mom yesterday, she immediately FaceTimed me on my dad’s iPhone so I could see her using it. She says she loves having an app on her homescreen that she can open and immediately talk with me. And she likes that when I’m using it she knows I’m thinking of her.
Of course in-person family time is the best so I’ll be going home tomorrow for the holidays and can’t wait to see her and the rest of my family.
Happy Holidays Everyone!
— Kevin Xu (@imkevinxu)
Email me if this resonated with you, I’d love to talk more about families and apps! kevin[at]imkevinxu.com
Update post about what’s next: https://medium.com/imhome-family-stories/i-built-an-app-for-my-mom-whats-next-2b35ab4f43d9
Thanks to Dave Fontenot, Basil Siddiqui, Alexey Komissarouk, Paul Benigeri, Katherine Chen, Mark Bao, and Charles Naut for reading drafts of this.
