Dotted

The hard part of shared living was never remembering the trash. It's what happens when someone doesn't take it out. Your options today are an awkward conversation, a passive-aggressive group chat, or quietly doing it yourself again.

Chore apps treat this as a reminder problem. Dotted treats it as a governance problem: rules everyone formally accepts, changes that go through a vote, and a fairness record the system keeps, so no roommate has to play enforcer.

It's built for roommates, couples, and families splitting chores, bills, and house rules. The win is a house that runs without awkward conversations: obligations explicit, exceptions visible, history auditable. Some things stayed deliberately out of scope: badges, streaks, leaderboards, anything that scores adults like children.

A rotation is easy until someone's sick, traveling, or slammed. Most of the design lives in the exception paths.

Pass. Step aside with a reason and the chore opens for anyone to claim. The rescuer earns credit, and the rotation continues from them. Passing is nearly free on purpose: honesty has to cost less than going silently overdue.

Bump. The house votes to push a due date one cycle. Same assignee, no penalty. A bump is a house decision, so it should feel like one.

Overdue. No automatic recovery. The chore sits in the assignee's name, visibly, until someone picks it up. The visibility is the point.

Verify. A housemate confirms each completion, and a rejected one costs the same as a miss. Self-reporting is how chore apps become fiction.

Each house writes an agreement covering things like quiet hours, guests, and kitchen expectations, and every member formally accepts it. Changing a rule is a proposal and a vote, not an admin edit. Anyone joining sees the agreement before they ask in.

Some rules actually run. When quiet hours start, a Live Activity appears on the lock screen and Dynamic Island, and the app quiets its own notifications. The agreement isn't a PDF.

See who's pulling their weight without turning the house into a game. The obvious design here is a leaderboard. I wrote a principle against it before writing code: Dotted should not treat chores like an arcade game. The scoreboard is an output of the governance system, not the product's core fantasy.

That principle forced a better scoring model. Raw chore counts are unfair; someone away for two weeks shouldn't rank last. So standings are measured against what each person was actually responsible for. Rescuing a housemate's overdue chore counts more than doing your own. Approved time away counts for nothing, in either direction.

The weights changed with testing. A late-penalty curve replaced the binary on-time/late split, and the penalty for passing a chore was removed entirely once it was clear it punished honesty.

Dotted also handles bills, balances, and settle-ups. The sharpest feature is receipt splitting: scan a grocery receipt and everyone claims their own items.

The icon is structured lists inside a house silhouette, built in Apple's Icon Composer with proper light and dark renders. In-app, the design stays close to native SwiftUI. It should feel like it belongs on iOS.

Dotted is a functional beta headed for App Store review — the product page is live at getdotted.app — but the app is unreleased, so there are no outcomes to report. The plan was written before launch so it can't be cherry-picked after. The funnel that matters is social: does approval kill joins, does a solo creator ever invite anyone, does the delayed notification ask earn a yes. Retention reads per path; creators and joiners have different day-7 stories.

Instrumentation is in place before day one: first-party PostHog analytics, opt-in by default, with no cross-app tracking. What's still ahead of launch is the remote push pipeline and the last App Store review blockers — backend correctness shipped first on purpose, because a trust product that miscounts is dead on arrival.