A bit of my background, I'm a software developer of 20+ years and took interest in Android development some 15 years ago, joined big and small companies (including startups) working on mostly consumer Android and iOS apps. The latest startup company that I joined ran out of money and I'm suddenly out of job, so while looking for job (job market pretty grim for mobile devs right now) I took the opportunity to work on this project which I wanted to do for some time. This is not vibe coded, but AI is used of course to speed up development, especially the non essential parts like the landing page website (sorry). Being a veteran developer, I'm still trying to adjust the mindset of utilizing agentic AI in day to day workflow, but so far so good - planning and brainstorming with the AI feels like sci-fi, and so far I'm loving the boost in productivity due to these tools, and of course I'll be careful not to let AI take the front role seat when designing and coding the essential parts of the app.
Btw this is not my first commercial app, I've published an Android only app called Credit Card Manager more than 10 years ago as a hobby project, it still has active users.
The Story:
Me and my wife like stacking discounted gift cards, particularly for weekly groceries. SuperCards, while great, does not have native gift card support for balance tracking.
There are many apps in this space, but most of them work strictly offline due to security and privacy concerns. I use BitWarden to store shared cards between me and my wife, such as credit cards (for auto-fill when shopping online), and eBay gift cards, using their ‘share vault’ feature. It works great but they do not support barcodes.
So I thought of building one such app that combines the features of gift card managers with BitWarden’s password manager level security and ‘share vault’ feature.
I called it CardWarden. (not very creative with names)
Designed from the ground up, I want the app to instantly sync data between family members in real-time, with security done right - zero knowledge server architecture (server can’t see user data, attacker of a breach gets nothing) with client-side encryption, public/private key exchange when sharing cards (true end to end encryption), and also without sacrificing privacy or handing our sensitive financial habits over to a third party.
The UI is built to be reactive, so if my wife spends a gift card at the register, the remaining balance on my screen updates instantly without requiring a manual pull-to-refresh.
The app is cross platform Android and iOS. Check out the screenshots and join the beta here if you're interested:
[https://cardwarden.app\](https://cardwarden.app/)