Zenith Devlog: One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

Welcome back to the Zenith development diaries! The past few weeks have truly tested our patience, but they’ve also taught us invaluable lessons about building a product from the ground up.

Here is exactly what’s been happening behind the scenes since early June, and why we decided to tear down a massive portion of our work to rebuild it stronger.

The Mystery of the White Screen

It all started on my personal Samsung S22. Instead of opening up to a sleek dashboard of long-term goals, habits, and financial tracking, the app greeted me with a completely blank white screen. It just refused to run.

After a lot of digging, we finally unmasked the culprit:

• The Web Trap: Originally, our tech stack relied heavily on tools meant for standard web development. In reality, we were building a web page and forcing it to adjust to a mobile viewport.
• Compatibility Crashing: Android is highly fragmented. Between custom manufacturer software overlays and specific rendering engines (like Vulkan), the mobile environment simply rejected the web-based backend structure.

We had two choices: spend months hunting for obscure, expensive duct-tape fixes that would inevitably break later, or make the hard executive call to rewrite the core of the app. We chose to rebuild.

Shifting to React Native

To ensure Zenith runs smoothly, natively, and flawlessly on any Android device, we migrated the entire project to React Native.

Now, you might think that with modern AI tools, translating code from one framework to another is a breeze—like switching from British English to American English. In reality, the architectural paradigms are entirely different. The AI consistently struggled with the mobile layout folders and state management, meaning I had to manually supervise, correct, and rewrite almost everything. The time I had already invested before? I had to spend it all over again.

The silver lining? I already knew the exact blueprint of the app. Because the UI layout and features were crystal clear in my mind, rebuilding the front-end—from the Wallet setup to the Diet and Weight planners—went incredibly fast.

Our Current Boss Battle: Sync & Load Times

The front-end looks great, and the interface is highly responsive. However, we have run into a massive bottleneck with our cloud database synchronization.

Here is exactly what we are battling right now:

The Problem	What Happens in Practice
Session Amnesia	Logging into Zenith via a desktop browser works perfectly. But if we try to log in through the Google Play Store build or the Expo Go testing environment using the exact same email, the app treats it as a brand-new session. It completely ignores existing cloud data and forces us to start from absolute zero.
Critical Delays	The authentication process currently takes about 30 seconds of pure waiting. Furthermore, adding certain items—like tracking a habit or updating an expense category—can take up to a minute to actually process and appear on the screen.

This completely paralyzes our ability to run proper quality assurance. Zenith is built around a comprehensive Gamification System—you earn XP for completing tasks, maintain streaks for habits and resolutions, and unlock badges as you level up your life. To see if the Zenith System functions properly over time, we need to use the app continuously. We can't catch long-term bugs if the system resets our progress every single time we log back in.

The Bigger Picture

Our singular focus until the end of June is to squash this synchronization bug. Once the app communicates flawlessly with the cloud, we can move directly into full-scale, realistic beta testing.

Building an "everything app" that seamlessly unifies long-term goals (like becoming an actor), daily habits (like morning pushups), full weekly diet planning with auto-generated shopping lists, project subtasks, and complete multi-account financial tracking (bank, cash, investments) is an immense undertaking—especially for our first time.

Missing our April deadline was a reality check, but it doesn't change our trajectory. We are not abandoning this project.