7habits

A local-first web bundle wrapped in Capacitor, with two native plugins

The shipped iPhone app is a React and Vite bundle running inside Capacitor, with no server and no account, and all habit data held on the device through Zustand persisted to Capacitor Preferences. Only two jobs drop to native Swift, a StoreKit purchases plugin and an audio plugin, because those are the two things a web view genuinely cannot do well. Reaching for native only where the web layer actually fails keeps almost all of the app in one fast, portable codebase.

Owning the audio session the web view kept muting

The habit notes are synthesised in WebAudio, and iOS silenced them on the ring switch, because WebKit classes WebAudio inside a WKWebView as ambient audio and sets that category from its own process, out of my reach. So I wrote a native audio plugin with AVAudioEngine that claims the session as playback with mixWithOthers, while the web layer still decides the pitch and length of each note, so the sound is unchanged. When a web view fights you over a device capability, move only the capability to native and leave the logic in the web.

The purchase bug that was a missing plugin registration

On device, purchases did not work at all, and it was not the StoreKit code. The plugin was simply never registered with Capacitor, so the bridge did not exist. Registering it was the whole fix. On top of that I surfaced the real StoreKit error on the paywall instead of a generic failure, and retry product loading with a backoff. When a native bridge does nothing at all, suspect the wiring before the logic.

Reading entitlement so a paying user is never locked out

The app reads your entitlement silently from Transaction.currentEntitlements, with no AppStore.sync and no sign in prompt on launch, a lifetime purchase is never revoked, and a transient or offline check never removes access. Refunds and expiries re lock naturally, because they are simply absent from currentEntitlements. The rule is to fail open for a paying customer, a flaky network should never lock someone out of what they bought.

A trial that a clock change cannot reset

There is a short free preview after onboarding, then the paywall, and it is tracked by a last seen timestamp rather than a live countdown, so moving the device clock backward does not hand you a fresh trial. Any client side time gate has to assume the user can move the clock, so anchor it to a stamp you control, not to the wall clock.

Removing a dead trial layer and dishonest copy

Apple rejected a build over prices shown in screenshots, and separately I found the app still carried no credit card and free trial wording that no longer matched the real, card required StoreKit trial, spread across the app, the landing page, and the store metadata. A five reviewer sweep deleted the dead app managed trial layer and aligned every word to what actually happens. Dishonest copy is not only a review risk, it is a promise your product then has to keep.

The Lifetime plan that could not ship alone

After the subscriptions were approved, the 99 dollar Lifetime, a non consumable, hit the rule that a first non consumable must be submitted on a version, and could not ship on its own. I carried it on a new version 1.0.1 submitted together, then released all three plans. Some App Store rules are about which items ride on which version, and you tend to learn them only by hitting them.

Stopping a trial reminder from reaching people with no trial

A day twenty nine, your trial ends tomorrow notification could fire for people who never started a trial. I removed it and cancel any already scheduled copy on launch, so a message queued on an old build cannot still arrive. A scheduled local notification is a promise made in the past, so when the rule changes you have to go back and cancel what you already scheduled.