Last month my sister texted our family group chat asking if anyone had a chore app they actually liked. Six people responded. Five of them said no.
One person had tried something with stars and rewards. Another paid for a tracker that came with seventeen categories she'd never use. My mom still has a paper chart on the fridge with names and checkboxes, and honestly? It works better than most of what we've downloaded.
That conversation stuck with us. Not because chore apps are a thrilling product category — they're not — but because the problem is so ordinary. You know exactly what you need. You can say it out loud in one sentence. And still you end up scrolling the App Store, reading reviews, signing up for a free trial, and spending twenty minutes configuring something that almost fits.
That's why we built Miya.
Say what you need
Miya makes small personal apps from a sentence. Not templates. Not a gallery where you pick "tracker" or "quiz" and hope for the best. You describe what you want — "family chore tracker with Saturday yard duty and allowance for the kids" — and get something you can open and use.
For us, the test was simple: would my sister's family actually use it on a random Tuesday? Not during a demo. Not once, out of politeness. On a Tuesday when the trash needed to go out and nobody could remember whose turn it was.
That's the bar. A real app for a real routine. Most of them take about a minute to make. Some take a little longer if you want more polish. Either way, you're not learning a new system. You're not adapting your household to someone else's idea of how chores should work.
What you can make
We keep getting asked what Miya is "for." The honest answer is: daily life. The boring, specific, slightly weird stuff you already manage somehow.
Chore rotations. Morning routines. A budget for a road trip with friends. A pass-and-play trivia game for game night with inside jokes nobody else would get. A packing list for a kid's summer camp that isn't the generic one on Pinterest. A habit tracker that only cares about the three things you're actually trying to do, not twelve.
People hear "make an app" and think it sounds complicated. But you've already been making workarounds your whole life — notes app, group chat, spreadsheet, whiteboard. Miya is just a way to get something that fits without duct tape.
One early tester made a shared grocery list that sorted by aisle at their local store, not a generic supermarket layout. Another made a plant watering tracker with names for each succulent (they have twelve; we didn't ask). A third made a scoreboard for a neighborhood kickball league that only runs in August. None of those belong in a category picker. All of them make perfect sense once you hear the sentence behind them.
When it doesn't work
We'll say this plainly because we think you deserve that: sometimes it won't work. You ask for something too vague, or too ambitious, or we just miss. When that happens, you get a clear message — not a broken app that looks fine until you tap around and realize half of it doesn't do anything.
We care about that because nothing kills trust faster than a tool that wastes your time politely. If Miya can't make something usable, we'd rather tell you than ship a dud.
Your stuff stays yours
If you share an app with your family or friends, they get the same app — but their data is separate. Your chore chart doesn't mingle with theirs. Your scores don't leak into someone else's game night. Sharing the thing shouldn't mean sharing everything inside it.
There's also a Memory feature you can turn on if you want Miya to suggest new apps based on what you've been making. It's off by default. We don't think "surprise personalization" is a kindness.
What's next
Miya is coming to iOS, Android, and iPad. We're building the phone app first because that's where most of these moments happen — standing in the kitchen, on the couch before game night, in the car thinking about a trip.
trymiya.com is home base for now. We'll post here as we get closer. And if you have a sentence for something you've always wanted an app for — something too specific for the App Store — we'd love to hear it. That's literally the whole point.