WWDC 2023: Meet Indian developers making top-class mental wellness, fitness apps for the world

It's been close to six years since Apple opened the iOS App Design and Development Accelerator in Bengaluru and since then, many budding app developers have been able get expert mentorship to improve their apps and scale up their business not just in India, but worldwide too.

. So far, Apple App Accelerator has played host to more than 15,000 app creators and the developer community has grown big over the years and now, supports more than one million jobs in India alone.

. As World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2023 (June 5) gets closer, DH got an opportunity to interact with talented Indian iOS developer company founders of 'Gratitude' and 'Evolve' apps, which are making commendable work in the field of mental health wellness and fitness.

. Edited excerpts: Gratitude It is self-care wellness and fitness app. It also offers features such as the gratitude journal, affirmations, vision board, and daily motivation content, which help users to self-reflect and develop a healthy emotional balance in terms of joy, stress, loss of a loved one, and manage personal and work life better.

. DH: Can you please share a short origin story of the app Pritesh Sankhe (founder of Gratitude): This app was born out of a personal need to cope with a tough time. Around 5 years ago, I was probably at my lowest point in life. My family and I went into a negative spiral and I personally had anxiety and anger issues, lower self-esteem, and no sense of purpose. I felt I was constantly focusing on the negatives and what was lacking. During this time, I embarked on a self-improvement journey and stumbled upon the book “The Secret”. It led me to start thinking and writing about things I’m grateful for. I started keeping a journal where I would count my blessings and appreciate things in my life that I was earlier taking for granted. This simple exercise significantly changed my life and I eventually built my app “Gratitude” to remind me every day to journal my gratitude. I felt the app and this simple exercise could also make a difference in others people’s lives. So, I made the app public and thus began my mission of helping people to make “Gratitude as a way of life”.

. DH: Can you please share details on monthly active users and total downloads in the World/India Pritesh Sankhe: Gratitude app is primarily a journaling app that encourages you to be grateful by sending beautiful reminders like “What made you smile today?” or “What was the best part about today?”, etc. Over time and using the feedback from the people using the app, it grew to a self-care app that includes positive affirmations, daily motivation and visualisation tools. Since the app was made public in 2018, the app has over three million mn downloads across the world, and over 300k people use the app actively. Majorly, people from India, US, UK, Canada find our app organically.

. DH: With subscription fees, what special services do you offer to the customer? Do you offer professional counseling? Pritesh Sankhe: The Gratitude app is based on a freemium model. The app is free to use and you need to subscribe to our monthly or annual plan to unlock the app completely and use the premium features. These include personalisation features like adding photos, customising prompts, giving access to the library of positive affirmations, creating multiple vision boards, and multiple device support. We do not offer professional counseling in the app yet.

. DH: How helpful was the mentorship at Apple App Accelerator and what improvement your team was able to implement in the app Pritesh Sankhe: The mentorship at Apple App Accelerator has been instrumental in honing the Gratitude app's user experience. The team at the Accelerator helped us understand how to effectively leverage iOS design principles to create an intuitive and engaging user interface. They emphasized the importance of accessibility in design, leading us to shape our future roadmap to incorporate features such as Dynamic Type and voice support to make the app more accessible to a wider audience.

. DH: Are there any new features under work? And how soon they will be made available to the customers? Pritesh Sankhe: We are leveraging all the feedback we received from the Apple App Accelerator and currently working on the app to be in alignment with Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. This will make the app more aesthetically pleasing and simpler to use. We are adding several personalization features in the app suggested by our users to make the journal writing experience more joyful. This includes voice journaling, more backgrounds and colours, better journaling prompts, and improved support across all platforms - iOS, iPadOS, MacOS and watchOS. One of our major app updates is scheduled and will be made available to the customers by mid-June.

. Evolve It is co-founded by Anshul Kamath and Rohan Arora in 2020. Evolve is building the world’s most inclusive mental health app for the LGBTQ+ community. The app promises to help people how to deal with work stress, offer guided meditation, and practice self-love with their personalised daily self-care routine.

. Add to that it offers a safe space to the LGBTQIA community, helping them explore and accept their gender identity and sexuality. Evolve app provides special meditations for LGBTQIA individuals to deal with homophobia, micro-aggressions and more.

. DH: Can you please share a short origin story of the app

. Anshul said: Initially, we started out as a mental health app for everyone. However, in 2021, we decided to pivot towards an LGBTQ+ first app after seeing some early signs of traction. The LGBTQ+ community is one of the fastest-growing user segments globally and research shows that members of the community are almost 4 times as likely to experience serious mental illness compared to the general population.

. Plus our core team comprises people from diverse gender identities and sexual orientations and we understand firsthand the struggles and challenges of the community when it comes to mental health and wellness. This has helped us build an authentic product that’s loved all around the world.

. Recently, Evolve was even showcased at the White House by one of our users in the US and we’ve become mental health partners for numerous pride organizations across the world.

. DH: Can you please share details on monthly active users and total downloads in the World/India

. Anshul said: We have over 400,000 downloads globally and around 60,000 monthly active users.

. DH: With subscription fees, what special services do you offer to the customer? Do you offer professional counseling?

. Anshul said: The subscription on Evolve currently includes access to high-quality premium content, weekly support groups and live workshops. Our content includes interactive virtual therapy modules that are built in collaboration with queer therapists and other experts. For example, our content for lesbians is built by a therapist from California who identifies as lesbian. The weekly support groups and live workshops include regular meditation rooms, masterclasses around mental health hosted by experts and more! All of this takes place on the Evolve app itself.

. We are building a counseling and coaching platform later this year and there will be benefits to premium members for that as well.

. DH: Do you host any LGBTQ community meet-ups (virtual or at any designated location) to listen to and guide vulnerable young people

. Anshul said: We have weekly support groups on the app for different identities. For example, bisexual users have their own support group and this will be hosted by either a super user or an expert who identifies as bisexual. We also have a thriving community on the app where users can normalise lived and shared experiences and support each other.

. DH: How helpful was the mentorship at Apple App Accelerator and what improvement your team Anshul said: The Apple team has been extremely supportive of our mission and ensuring we have the mentorship to build a world-class app out of India. They’ve been guiding us on taking our design and UI/UX to the next level. We also have regular catch-ups with the Apple team to understand the latest features that iOS devices support (for example widgets, Siri integration, etc) and that helps us to streamline our roadmap to deliver a high-quality experience to iPhone users.

. DH: Are there any new features under work? And, how soon they will be made available to the customers?

. Anshul said: One of the biggest features in our pipeline is a coaching and mentoring platform that focuses on intersectional identities. For example, someone who’s Asian and bisexual can find a range of mentors from the community or even professional coaches of the same intersection. This will allow for extremely contextualized mental health outcomes compared to most other solutions available for members of the community. We plan to launch this in August this year.

. Must read | WWDC 2023: Here's what to expect at Apple's developers conclave

WWDC 2023: Meet Indian developers making top-class mental wellness, fitness apps for the world

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