I keep getting military calisthenics ads on Facebook and YouTube. Muscle Booster was one of them: quiz funnel, then a paywalled plan at US$9.99 a week. Light bulb moment: why don't I build my own app for morning exercise before my son gets up? My partner goes to personal training most mornings, so I can't leave him at home. It is also a health app to help me get rid of my dad bod. From that spark on Thursday evening through to early Friday, I went all the way to friends on Google Play internal testing with Grok Bot.
We locked fifteen bodyweight moves and dropped the cool-down. The quiet morning routine lands around nine minutes: a short warm-up, then timed work and rest, no jumping, so my son stays asleep. The working name started as Good Pro Portion, a portion-control pun on good proportion. It is now Nice Pro Portions, wink and all on the store label. Meal ideas sit on a done-screen card with hand-portion guides (palm of protein, fist of veg, cupped carbs, thumb of fat), plus grab-and-go supermarket ideas. No calorie counting.
Two rounds of mockups landed the same evening: eleven screens in light teal and dark coral, simple stick-figure animation loops. Round two filled out the figures, fixed the rest screen so it previews the next move, and cleaned the Remove ads line to say pay once, no subscription. I approved Phase 1 that night. Stack is Flutter, Android first, iPhone later from the same codebase. No backend for the MVP. The only hosting I expect later is a privacy policy page on d11s.space.
Code went into a new private repo on a feature-branch PR flow into a dev branch, with human-sounding commits. An apt mirror returned 502 while installing tooling. The Android emulator on the cloud box would not boot for lack of RAM, so early screenshots came from Flutter golden tests until real fonts fixed the blocky text. I asked a couple of general tax and ABN questions along the way (general information only, not advice). Admin bits included d11s Labs as the developer name and a Google Play Console account. Cloudflare Email Routing for apps@d11s.space cost nothing; I set that up myself.
Sideloading an APK on my Samsung taught the hard lesson about cached installs. A package-name mismatch for the main screen was the real crash; the phone kept opening an old file until I plugged into yogi with USB debugging, let the bot install adb in my home folder without sudo, and read the log off the device. There was a TalkBack detour in developer settings before the cable path worked.
Engagement design started from a hunch that people respond better to bodies that look more like their own. We reframed that to avoid weight stigma: the user picks a body shape (slim, average, larger) on parameterised stick figures, so fifteen animations stay fifteen. Check-ins ask how you feel before body shape. Goals use weekly dots instead of guilt streaks. There is a three-minute short-on-time mode, milestones for showing up, and a home-screen widget on the roadmap.
Cost honesty: mockups used about one percent of my monthly SuperGrok allowance. The skeleton came in around six percent against a two-to-three percent estimate (the bot owned the miss on its stop-at-three-percent promise). Project cap for this arc is near ten to fifteen percent with a price check before each chunk.
Then the fun part. Grok Bot built a signed Play upload (app bundle 0.1.0) and kept the keystore off the repo. I did the Console clicks myself, and it was honestly easy. By about midnight Nice Pro Portions was on Play Internal testing for a handful of friends. Woo hoo. Grok Bot is awesome at the build path; the human still owns Play Console.
Developer identity on the store is d11s Labs. The release that went live for testers is version 0.1.0 on the Internal testing track, available the same night we built the bundle.
What I had to do by hand
- Set up email forwarding for apps@d11s.space in Cloudflare Email Routing, which was free.
- Create the Google Play developer account (one-off fee) and finish Google's identity checks.
- Create the app in Play Console and fill the listing fields Google needs before a test release (icon, screenshots, short description, and the usual rating / data-safety forms).
- Upload the signed app bundle the bot built.
- Create an Internal testing release and add the friends who should install it.
Easter egg while naming things: Tesla Kid Vader is a full anagram of David Kelertas.
Next up I want friends' feedback on the quiet morning routine and the stick figures, then a follow-up post once closed testing and the broader Play path are in motion. Tonight proved Grok Bot can carry the build while I still own the Console.