Flourish — iOS’s First AI Therapy App (Jan 2023)
Overview
Flourish was the first AI therapy app on the iOS App Store. I shipped it in January 2023, a couple months after ChatGPT launched and well before the flood of AI wellness apps that came later.
The problem I was trying to solve wasn't complicated: therapy costs a lot of money and has long waitlists. A ton of people who would benefit from support just don't have access to it. Flourish wasn't trying to replace a therapist—it was trying to be the thing you could open on your phone when you're having a rough night and your next appointment is two weeks away.
The chat assistant ("Fleur") ran on GPT-3. I spent most of the prompt engineering effort on guardrails—keeping conversations supportive without overstepping, being upfront about what the app is, and knowing when to point someone toward professional help. Getting the tone wrong in a mental health context isn't just a bad user experience, it's genuinely irresponsible.
How it works
There's a home hub that routes to everything. Simple on purpose.
The chat is bubble-based with typing indicators and session memory so you can pick up previous conversations. The hard part wasn't the UI—it was the system prompts. I went through a lot of iterations trying to find a tone that was warm without being saccharine, and direct without being clinical. The assistant also needed to recognize when someone was describing something beyond its scope and nudge them toward real help.
Breathing exercises are an animated timer with haptics and optional white noise. I kept this as minimal as possible. If someone's mid-anxiety attack, they don't want to navigate a settings menu. Open it, follow the animation, done.
Journaling and assessments are structured prompts for mood, stress, and goals. Everything saves locally and syncs to the cloud when there's a connection. I didn't want someone to lose their journal entry because they were on the subway.
Onboarding goes through what the app does, what it doesn't do, and when to seek professional help. The paywall is RevenueCat-based freemium. I erred on the side of giving away too much for free rather than gating the tools people might actually need in a bad moment.
The stack
- Frontend: React Native + Expo, React Navigation, twrnc for styling, Moti for animations, Gesture Handler for touch
- AI: GPT-3 with conversation context and safety scaffolding in the prompt layer
- Backend: Firebase for auth, Realtime Database, and analytics
- Monetization: RevenueCat for subscriptions and entitlements
What I learned
Shipping an AI therapy app before anyone else had done it meant there were no patterns to follow for a lot of the decisions. What do you do when a user describes a crisis? How explicit should the AI limitations disclaimer be? Where exactly is the line between "wellness companion" and "unlicensed therapy"? These were design questions as much as technical ones, and the stakes were higher than usual — getting it wrong meant potentially harming someone who came to the app for help.
The thing I keep coming back to is how low the bar was for access. A therapy session costs $150–300. Flourish cost nothing for the core tools. That's not a solution to the mental health crisis, but it's something.
Note: Flourish is a consumer wellness companion, not a replacement for licensed care. In emergencies, contact local emergency services or appropriate hotlines.