Conscious Patterns Inc. is a New York City-based health and wellness startup seeking its seed funding after successful trials with major corporate and healthcare customers. The company creates a product called TUNE, which is a physical hardware bed equipped with sensors, auditory, and motor functions to create an immersive meditative experience.
Why did TUNE need an app?
Over the years, TUNE users had gotten used to a series of clunky web interfaces to control their device. It was never reliable and compromised the premium experience that the TUNE device itself was providing. Due to the unreliability of the existing system, we had a lot of hesitation of what unknowns might be uncovered in rebuilding it as an app. However, we had more conviction that it was important that the controller experience was as premium as the meditation experience provided by the TUNE device. So, we set out to build in July 2023…
Building a native app from scratch to open beta in just weeks
In case our objective was not ambitious enough, we also wanted to launch this experience to customers as soon as possible to start getting feedback early. We launched our open beta on July 26 after an intense development period. We had some key challenges to uncover in development:
– Uncover all elements of the web based system that would need to be translated into the app to maintain backwards compatibility with the existing device code
– Testing the app while some of the development team was remote from the physical TUNE device to test on
– Learning how to write native Swift code as JavaScript engineers
Any one of these risks could have been enough to sink the project but we had conviction it was the right balance between what we needed to deliver for customers in terms of experience quality and what we would be capable of as a small team with a short timeline. We got to work.
First we built a prototype app in the first week with Bluetooth functionality to connect directly to TUNE device hardware, which runs on Raspberry Pis. This was a key moment for us because it unlocked our build and test distribution flow for the app, as well as served as an intro to key concepts in modern iOS development such as SwiftUI.
As React developers, SwiftUI has some conceptual similarities in its approach to programmatic development of views. Of course the devil is in the details and plenty of pitfalls remain in using SwiftUI, but this was a language and approach to development that we could wrap our heads around and we proved quickly we could be productive with it.
After we proved basic controller concepts in this prototype app, the rest of development was making it feel good. We used video backgrounds and 3D graphics to make the experience of starting a session embody our brand ethos of relaxation and calm calibration.
Open beta results
We were skeptical that we could provide a step function change in reliability metrics right out the gate, but that's exactly what happened. Within our first month support volume was dramatically reduced. A few months later, we typically field almost zero inbound support requests on a monthly basis where we used to field nearly one per day. In our key established Studio partner locations, reliability is typically over 99% uptime.
After a few months of refinement, improvements, and installing enhanced monitoring to make sure that we have visibility into customer success, it was time to make it official. We officially announced general availability of TUNE OS on the Apple App Store on November 20, 2023. If you're a TUNE customer who hasn't checked out the app yet, be sure to check it out here!