You want to track your baby's milestones, but every app you try has too many ads, too many features you don't need, or a design that just doesn't feel right. Sound familiar?
Here's a thought: what if you just built exactly the app you want?
With Rork, you can create a custom baby diary app in about an hour — no programming experience required. This tutorial walks you through the entire process, from writing your first prompt to testing the finished app on your phone.
What We're Building
The app we're creating is deliberately simple. There are four core features:
- Daily journaling: Save a date, text note, and optional photo as a single entry
- Growth tracking: Log height and weight, visualized as a line chart over time
- Timeline view: Browse past entries in reverse chronological order
- Photo gallery: See all photo entries in a 3-column grid
No push notifications. No social sharing. No cloud sync — at least not yet. The goal is to build something you can actually open, add an entry, and close in under 30 seconds. Everything else can be added later.
One thing I've noticed building personal apps: the simpler the first version, the more likely you are to use it consistently. A polished feature-heavy app that takes too much mental energy to open will collect dust. A plain-looking app that gets out of your way gets used.
The Prompt to Use in Rork
Open Rork and start a new project. Paste the following prompt exactly:
Create a baby diary app for tracking a child's growth and daily moments.
Screens:
1. Home screen - Show the 5 most recent entries as cards, with a "+" button at the bottom right
2. Add Entry screen - Date picker (defaults to today), text memo field, optional photo picker, save button
3. Growth Tracker screen - Input fields for height (cm) and weight (kg), display history as a line chart
4. Photo Gallery screen - Show only entries with photos in a 3-column grid layout
Navigation: Bottom tab bar (Home, Growth, Gallery)
Design: Pastel green and white color scheme, soft and calm aesthetic
Font: Rounded, easy-to-read typeface
Data storage: Save to local device storage (no internet required)
Language: English UIRork will generate the complete app structure in a few minutes. Once it's done, check the preview on the right side of the screen to get a feel for the layout.
You can also personalize the prompt before generating — things like "include a field for the child's name in Settings" or "use a lavender color theme" work well. The more specific you are about what you want visually, the closer the first result will be to what you're imagining.
Three Things to Test After Generation
Once Rork generates your app, open it in the Companion app or on a real device. Don't just look at the preview — actually tap through it. Here's what to test:
1. Data persistence
Add 2–3 test entries using the "+" button, then close and reopen the app. The entries should still be there. If they disappear on restart, there's a problem with how data is being saved. Fix it with:
Entries are disappearing when I close and reopen the app.
Please fix the local storage implementation using AsyncStorage to ensure data persists between sessions.This is the single most common issue with first-generation Rork apps that involve user data. Getting it right early saves a lot of frustration later.
2. Photo display
Pick a photo from your camera roll, save it as a diary entry, and confirm it shows up in the Home screen card and in the Gallery tab. If photos appear as black rectangles or don't load at all, try:
Photos are showing as black rectangles in the app.
Please switch from saving the image URI to saving a Base64-encoded version of the image instead.3. Growth chart rendering
Navigate to the Growth Tracker screen and add at least 3 data points for both height and weight. The line chart should connect the points correctly. A single entry won't produce a line, so always test with multiple entries before assuming the chart works.
Common Refinements After the First Build
Here are the most frequent follow-up prompts to have ready. You probably won't need all of them, but a few will be useful:
Change the date format
Change the date display format to "April 20, 2026 (Sunday)".
It's currently showing in a non-localized format.Improve the card layout on the Home screen
Update the Home screen card design:
- Show a square thumbnail on the left if the entry has a photo
- Display the date and the first 50 characters of the memo on the right
- Add more vertical spacing between cardsAdd the baby's age in months to the growth chart
Show the baby's age in months on the X-axis of the growth chart.
Calculate this from the birth date, which should be configurable from a Settings screen.The key to getting good results from Rork is specificity. "Make it look better" won't get you far. "Set the card background to white, place a 64px square thumbnail on the left, and show the date in gray above the memo text on the right" — that level of detail gives Rork something to work with. For more on this, see Rork UI Generation Prompt Patterns.
Two Important Considerations for Baby Diary Apps
This category of app has some practical challenges that are worth addressing before you get attached to a version that might cause problems later.
Photo storage bloat: Baby diary apps are used for months or years, and photos accumulate fast. Without compression, an app that works perfectly at launch can become sluggish with hundreds of entries. Add this early:
Before saving a photo, resize it to a maximum width of 800px and compress it to 80% quality.
Keep the original aspect ratio and apply this to all new photo entries going forward.This typically reduces photo file sizes by 60–80% with no visible quality difference on a phone screen.
Data backup: Losing several months of photos and notes to a broken phone is the kind of thing you really don't want to experience. Even without cloud sync, a manual export option gives you a safety net:
Add an export feature that saves all diary entries and growth records as a JSON file.
Name the file "babydiary_YYYYMMDD.json" using the current date.
Allow the user to share or save it using the native share sheet.Once exported, that file can live in iCloud, Google Drive, or emailed to yourself. It's a simple but meaningful reliability feature for an app that holds irreplaceable data.
Adding Cloud Sync Later
The local-only approach is great for getting started quickly, but if you want to share memories with a partner, or access your records from multiple devices, you can add cloud sync without rebuilding the whole app.
Supabase integrates cleanly with Rork. The free tier is generous — 50,000 rows is far more than a baby diary will ever need:
Add Supabase as a backend for cloud sync.
Tables:
- diary_entries (id, date, memo, photo_url, created_at)
- growth_records (id, date, height, weight, created_at)
No user authentication needed — this is a single-user app.
Store the Supabase project URL and API key as environment variables.Creating a Supabase project and getting your API keys takes about 10 minutes. After that, Rork handles the rest. For more on the fundamentals of building apps with Rork, Build Your First App in 30 Minutes with Rork is a helpful overview.
If You Want to Publish to the App Store
If this turns into something other parents might find useful and you want to share it, publishing is absolutely possible. A few things to prepare for:
Privacy policy: Any app that handles photos requires one. Ask Rork: "Generate a privacy policy for a baby diary app that stores photos on-device and optionally syncs to Supabase." This gives you a starting draft — you'll want to review it, but it's a reasonable foundation.
App Store assets: The icon and screenshots are the first thing a potential user sees. They matter more than most developers expect. The App Store publishing guide covers what you'll need.
Avoiding App Review friction: Any language that could be interpreted as medical advice or health monitoring for diagnostic purposes will get flagged. Describe your app as a "diary and journal" not a "health tracker," and include a line in your app description: "This app is not intended for medical or clinical use."
The Feature That Actually Matters
The most important feature of a baby diary app isn't the line chart or the gallery layout. It's how fast a parent can open the app and add an entry during an unstructured moment — mid-feeding, before the baby falls asleep, during a rare quiet minute.
If it takes more than a couple of taps to add an entry, entries stop getting added. So if you're going to optimize anything, optimize for that.
Some things worth trying once the basic version is working:
- Launch directly to the Add Entry screen instead of the Home timeline
- Allow saving a photo with no text (not everyone wants to write)
- Make the date picker optional — if you're logging something right now, defaulting to today is almost always correct
Start with the prompt above, test it on your phone tonight, and adjust from there. That's the whole workflow. If you're curious where this kind of project can lead, the AI fitness coach app tutorial is a good next step — it covers AI-driven features in a health-adjacent app format.