- iOS & Android
- Launched 2026
- Solo build
gardeenCase study
A dhikr app where remembrance grows a living 3D garden.
TheProblem
A digital tasbih counter is just a number that resets. It's useful, but there's little reason to come back to it tomorrow.
gardeen asks a simple question: what if every dhikr left something visible behind? The count becomes a garden that only ever grows, so consistency has something to show for it.
TheProduct
The heart of the app is a 3D garden rendered on the device. Each SubhanAllah nudges the tree from a sprout towards full bloom, and as the lifetime count climbs, grass, wildflowers, blossoms, ferns and butterflies appear — each with a short Qur'anic reminder.
Around that sits everything a real product needs: accounts shared with Muslamica, offline-safe counting that syncs in the background, daily streaks with reminders, leaderboards, helping friends' gardens, an optional Premium tier, home-screen widgets and support for nine languages.
InsideThe app
Every tap grows the garden — new plants arrive as the count rises. 
Make dhikr for someone else and help their garden grow. 
A shared leaderboard across all gardens.
What itDoes
- 01
Interactive 3D garden
A real-time scene built with three.js through react-three-fiber, with day and night skies, ambient sound and plants that grow with your count.
- 02
Dhikr counting and progression
A tasbih counter with levels up to 110 and unlockable plants. Taps are stored on the device first and synced to the account, so nothing is lost offline.
- 03
Streaks, reminders and leaderboards
Daily streaks backed by scheduled Cloud Functions and push notification reminders, plus shared and custom leaderboards.
- 04
Helping each other
Users can make dhikr for a friend's garden, and come back to see who helped theirs grow.
- 05
Premium and payments
In-app subscriptions through RevenueCat, plus web checkout through Stripe — one subscription unlocks Premium across gardeen and Muslamica.
- 06
Widgets, languages and more
Home-screen widgets, nine languages including Arabic and Urdu, Apple and Google sign-in, and a scan feature that reads a physical tasbih counter from a photo.
UnlockablePlants
Rendered from the app's own 3D models — the same objects that appear in the garden.
Grass
Rock
Wildflowers
Blossoms
Mushrooms
Fern
Flowering bush
Butterflies
The technical challenge: a 3D scene inside a mobile app
Most apps are lists and forms. gardeen has to keep a live 3D scene smooth on ordinary phones while the rest of the app — sheets, counters, network calls — carries on around it.
That meant measuring the real 3D models before tuning anything, saving every tap on the device first so counting never waits on the network, and treating the garden as a view of saved progress rather than the source of it. The count is the truth; the garden is how it becomes visible.
Shipping and maintaining it
gardeen is built with Expo Application Services: development builds for native features like widgets, store builds for both platforms, and over-the-air updates for JavaScript fixes between releases.
MyRole
I designed and built gardeen myself, from the first commit in July 2026 to release on the App Store and Google Play: the React Native app, the 3D garden, the backend endpoints and the release pipeline.
It runs on the same Firebase project and Cloud Functions backend as Muslamica, so I extended that backend rather than starting a second one — one account, one Premium subscription, two apps.
Built with
- React Native
- Expo
- Expo Router
- TypeScript
- react-three-fiber / three.js
- Firebase Auth
- Cloud Firestore
- Cloud Functions
- RevenueCat
- Stripe
- Push notifications
- EAS Build & Update
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