Build 13:a calmer app, two new tools, six new languages

What this update covers

Hi, I'm Serhii, the founder of Mommy Refuel. September 13th was, honestly, the biggest single day of app work since the pilot went live. Rather than a one-line changelog, here's the full picture: what changed for you, in what order, and where it's headed — build 13, prepared the same day for TestFlight.

A calmer, lighter design — on every screen

The app moved toward a calmer, light-first look: a warm cream-and-burgundy palette, lighter type, softer tinted bands instead of dark cards. On Today, the score card now clearly labels "Refuel Score" with the date, a proportional ring, and Sleep/Energy/Mood chips pulled from your latest check-in — shown only when a real score exists, never a placeholder pretending to be one. The main recommendation moved from a dark card to a calm powder-coloured band, and Small steps now reveal "Did this help?" only after you mark a step done, so the list starts calm instead of asking for a rating up front.

Refuel AI's empty state got a warmer greeting with a few compact starter prompts instead of six identical buttons. The tab bar is lighter and more consistent. And a new gentle-appearance animation — one calm fade-and-settle on first load — was carried across the Weekly Report, Care, and You screens, so the whole app opens the same unhurried way (Today keeps its own slightly richer entrance, as the flagship screen).

Underneath, I made the colour system properly adaptive: every neutral token (background, card, text, border) now has real light and dark values, so dark mode is a coherent warm near-black instead of light panels awkwardly floating on dark chrome. I checked Today in both light and dark, at the largest accessibility text size, before calling it done.

Two new tools: Supplies & restock, and Shared expenses

Two things mothers had asked for went from roadmap entries to real, working features the same day, both in beta and both entirely local to your phone.

Supplies & restock is a quiet tracker for the essentials — nappies, formula, bottles, whatever you're keeping an eye on. It surfaces what's running low first, learns your consumption pace from how fast a count drops, and shows a "days left" estimate per item once it has enough data (conservatively — it waits for a second drop before it trusts the trend). You can turn on a gentle daily reminder that only fires while something is actually low and cancels itself the moment you're stocked again, and you can share a plain-text shopping list through the system share sheet with a partner or a nanny — nothing syncs anywhere on its own.

Shared expenses does the "who owes what" maths for family spending — a shared cost splits evenly, something reimbursable (like a nanny's shopping trip) is owed back in full, and rounding never leaves the ledger out of balance. I want to be precise here: it calculates and records, it does not move money. Settling up still happens outside the app, on purpose — there is no in-app payment.

Speaking your language — six more, plus Russian

The app already auto-detected your device's language for English and Ukrainian. This update adds an explicit first-run choice (pre-selected to your device language, so accepting it is seamless) and then rebuilds the whole language system to scale: a language catalog that makes adding a new locale a data change, not a rewrite.

Using that new system, I added Spanish, German, French, Polish, Italian and Portuguese, and — separately, deliberately — Russian: offered for the many Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine and Ukrainians abroad, as support for people rather than any endorsement of the aggressor state. Later the same day, I translated the full set of app strings (not just the core screens) into all seven new locales, matching the depth Ukrainian already had, and fixed a couple of things a language-by-language screenshot review turned up, like German energy labels that overflowed their pill. Five crisis and safety strings are intentionally left in English in every new locale until they get a professional human review — that's not a gap I'm willing to fill with a machine draft.

Small fixes that matter more than they sound

A few changes are small in code but matter in practice. Logging a symptom now has an optional free-text "add detail" field, and — importantly — that note is safety-scanned on save just like everything else, so a concerning note in your own words still surfaces crisis or escalation guidance; it's stored on your device only and never sent to AI or analytics. "Continue with Apple" moved next to the guest profile card so it's the one obvious next step for a guest, instead of buried at the bottom. And I fixed a real undercount in how the app measures active use: it was only counting check-ins as "active," because the app never actually emitted an open event — now every foreground open is tracked, still fully opt-in and value-free (we count that the app opened, never what you did in it).

Getting ready for the App Store

All of the above needed a fresh build. I bumped the version to build 13 (v2.0.0) and added the export configuration needed to package it for App Store Connect. I also rewrote the App Store listing metadata to describe the app honestly as a live update rather than a first launch, and captured a fresh set of App Store screenshots from the redesigned app. The actual upload to App Store Connect still runs with my own Apple credentials — that step isn't automated, and I'm not claiming build 13 reached the App Store here; what I can say precisely is that it was prepared and packaged for TestFlight that day.

One administrative note: moving to our own company

The following day, I documented the process of moving the app's Apple Developer account from a personal one to seven a.m., the studio I founded — so the App Store listing will eventually show the company as the seller, not an unrelated name. That's paperwork and process, not a product change, and I'm mentioning it here only for completeness.

Where and when

• 09:25 — Gentle entrance animation carried across Weekly Report, Care and You (d0c2325). Local build.
• 10:25 — Calmer, light-first redesign with adaptive dark mode across Today, tab bar, Refuel AI and Care (6554cc3). Local build.
• 11:53 — Build bumped to 13 (v2.0.0); App Store export configuration added (b14714a).
• 14:51 – 16:44 — Roadmap entries for professional emotional support and family logistics added, then built: Supplies & restock ships (ab108d7), Shared expenses ledger ships (6afdc88).
• 15:20 – 16:37 — Refuel AI empty state reordered to surface emotional-support prompts (ccc4396); symptom free-text detail with safety scanning added (cec31f6); Supplies gets a "days left" forecast (5002f9b).
• 15:11 — Active-users tracking fixed to count real app opens (bbe8ad2).
• 15:49 — First-run language choice, pre-selected to device language (f2299f9).
• 16:31 – 16:33 — Scalable multi-language system; Spanish, German, French, Polish, Italian and Portuguese added (a1692d7); Ukrainian strings for the day's new features filled in (4586ddf).
• 16:44 – 16:47 — "Share shopping list" added to Supplies via the system share sheet (93cddeb).
• 16:50 — Russian added, plus a solidarity statement on the website (dd99ca7).
• 20:06 — Full app string localization (not just core screens) for all seven new locales (6ae986d).
• 20:11 — German energy labels shortened to fit the UI (3f7342f).
• 20:33 — App Store listing metadata rewritten for a live-update launch (a6c67b5).
• 21:03 — Fresh App Store screenshots captured from the redesigned app (650f16c).
• Sept 14, 21:42 — Process documented for moving the Apple Developer account to seven a.m. (16bf3f1).

What's next

Supplies and Shared expenses are both in beta, meaning they're live for you to try but I expect to keep adjusting them — Care Circle sharing for Supplies is a planned next step once there's a proper sharing layer to build it on. And as you'll see in the next update, the language work didn't stop here: it turned out the language picker didn't actually make the UI switch languages reliably, and I fixed that within two days.