A few years ago I was running my own tasks and reminders through n8n — a workflow automation tool, hosted on a server I paid for and maintained myself, just so I wouldn't forget things. It worked. But eventually the actual math stopped making sense: keeping a server alive for purely personal task management cost more, in money and attention, than the problem was worth. So I shut it down and decided to build something that just lived on my own phone instead. Raven Assistant is what came out of that decision — and it's launching publicly this coming Sunday, October 4.
01It started with a to-do list I kept ignoring
I'm Okumu Joseph — a software developer, and an IT student at Taita Taveta University in Kenya. I build things for myself first, and Raven Assistant is the clearest example of that: I didn't set out to build a company, I set out to fix the specific way I kept letting myself down. Every task app I tried was good at recording what I meant to do. None of them were any good at noticing when I didn't do it.
02Most task apps track. This one holds you to it
That's the actual thesis of the app, and it shows up in two specific mechanisms rather than a slogan. First: a task scheduled for a real time window that runs past its end time doesn't just sit there looking overdue — it automatically flips to Missed, and Raven immediately proposes the next open slot to make it up. No self-reporting, because self-reporting is exactly the step I kept skipping.
Second, and the one people tend to ask about first: Focus Mode can carry a real, self-imposed financial cost for quitting early. You lock onto one task, an accessibility guard keeps you out of anything outside your allowlist, and if you set a fee before starting, ending the session early actually charges you that amount. It's optional — the default is free, and it stays free unless you deliberately set a stake for yourself. I built it because I noticed the same thing everyone eventually notices about willpower: it's a lot more reliable once something real is attached to it.
03A whole day, not just a list
The rest of the app grew out of the same instinct — that a useful assistant should look at your actual day, not just a flat list. Plan My Day lays out what's already fixed today, what's missed and needs a make-up slot, and a protected sleep block sized to what you're genuinely short on, detected from your phone's own screen-on/off activity — not something you type in yourself. Real calendar events get merged into every one of these decisions too, so nothing Raven suggests ever collides with an actual meeting. And in the evening, a short check-in folds in what really happened that day — logged sleep, which suggestions you actually followed through on — so a 14-day growth trend means something instead of being a guess.
Your data stays on your phone.
Tasks, reminders, and timers are stored locally — no server involved. The only calls this app makes off-device are for the AI features you actually choose to use, and I've spent real effort making sure even those stay cheap and fast rather than slow and gratuitous.
04Built alone, on a real phone, the slow way
There's no team behind this — every screen, every backend endpoint, every migration has been mine to get right or get wrong. That meant a lot of throwing things away. The goal visualization screen alone went through three completely different designs — a procedurally generated tree, then illustrated growth-stage art, then the interactive winding path it uses today — because the first two genuinely weren't good enough and I'd rather rebuild a screen than ship something I didn't believe in. There's also no emulator in this build process — every feature that touches notifications, Focus Mode, sleep detection, or the launcher home screen has only ever been verified on a real device, because that's the only way to actually trust it works.
The same discipline applies to the AI features. Every one of them is built to do exactly as much thinking as the task actually needs and no more — fitting one task into open time is a mechanical problem a plain algorithm solves instantly, so that's what handles it; deciding whether two of your goals are meaningfully connected is a real judgment call, so that one genuinely calls an AI, once, and remembers the answer instead of asking again.
05Free where it counts
The entire app — every theme, full task and goal tracking, Focus Mode including the optional commitment fee — is free. Raven Premium is a simple monthly subscription that exists for one reason: people who lean on the AI features constantly ran into the same fair-use limit that keeps them free for everyone else. It raises that ceiling. That's the whole pitch — nothing about the core app is held back behind it.
06Launching October 4
Raven Assistant goes live on the Google Play Store this coming Sunday, October 4. If you want to know the moment it's available instead of stumbling onto it later, leave your email below — I'll send exactly one message, when it launches, and nothing else.