Hummingbird — An ADHD App Built From the Inside

Overview

Hummingbird wasn't built because it fit a market opportunity. It was built because the tools that existed weren't built for ADHD brains — they assumed consistency, punished missed days, and demanded structure from people whose neurology resists it. The brief was entirely personal: build the app I always wished existed. Something that feels like care, not another thing to fail at. A companion that notices patterns, offers grounding tools when things feel too much, and never makes you feel like you're doing it wrong.

The Challenge

Consumer mental health apps face a specific design challenge: the people who need them most are the ones least likely to engage consistently. An app that requires daily habit-forming behaviour is asking a lot from someone whose brain is wired to resist exactly that. The technical challenge was building a PWA that felt native — fast, installable on any device, works offline — without an app store, without accounts, without cloud storage. Everything had to run on-device to protect user privacy. No data leaves the phone.

The Solution

Hummingbird was built as a React 18 + Vite PWA, hosted on Vercel, with all data stored in localStorage on the device. No backend, no accounts, no cloud — which means no privacy concerns and no barrier to entry. Visit the URL, add it to your home screen, and it's yours. The product covers eight interconnected areas: daily check-ins (mood, energy, focus, sleep), a coaching view that tracks week-over-week patterns and reflects them back, a Wins Jar for collecting the things your brain tries to tell you don't count, a medication tracker that builds a picture over time, ADHD-friendly habit tracking that doesn't punish missed days, a grounding toolkit (box breathing, 5-4-3-2-1, focus timer, dopamine menu), 14-day visual insights, and a Glimmers List for small joys to return to on hard days. Every design decision was tested against a single question: does this feel like care, or does it feel like pressure? The visual language is warm and calm. There are no streaks, no shame mechanics, no notifications that make you feel behind.

Hummingbird is available free at hummingbirdapp.uk — no app store, no account, no data collection. It installs on any device and works entirely offline. The source code is also available as a paid download for anyone who wants to customise or build on top of it.