Meowdrate

A hydration app that starts full instead of empty. No points to grind, no shop, no ads, no accounts - just a flood that recedes as you drink, a cat to rescue, and a sarcastic narrator who has opinions about your hydration habits.

What it is

The screen is a flood scene: water swishing near the top, sky shifting with the real time of day. Each drink you log recedes the flood a little, slowly saving the cat from the water. Clear it fully and the cat says thanks; leave it unfinished and the narrator will have a comment about that too. Nothing is ever actually lost. No streak-shaming, no locked content, no per-day history to grieve if you miss a day or lose the phone. There's a day-count, but it's tucked away in Settings rather than sitting on the home screen. The goal is better habits, not a number pulling you back to check in.

Everything is stored locally - no backend, no login. This is intentional.

Tech stack

• Flutter (Dart)
• Riverpod (flutter_riverpod) for state management
• shared_preferences for local persistence
• audioplayers for self-made sound effects (optional — the app runs silently until files are dropped in, see assets/audio/README.md)
• flutter_local_notifications + timezone/flutter_timezone for scheduled hydration reminders
• home_widget for the optional Android home-screen widget
• url_launcher for the credits/support links in Settings

How to run

Prerequisites

• Flutter SDK (brew install --cask flutter)
• Chrome (web), or Xcode/Android Studio for simulators/devices

Install

flutter pub get

Run

flutter run -d chrome   # easiest — no simulator/emulator required
flutter run              # picks any connected device/simulator

Useful commands:

flutter analyze
flutter test

Design principles

• Clear boundaries: UI vs. state/providers vs. data/repositories
• Small, focused modules per feature (hydration / flood / creatures / narrator / settings / reminders / debug)
• Local-first persistence, no backend dependency — and deliberately shallow: no per-day history is kept, so there's nothing to lose
• Two independent theming axes: the flood scene's automatic day/night sky (device clock) and the user's manual Light/Dark/System chrome preference never affect each other
• Consistent styling via theme tokens