Ortiki — Never Miss a Warranty or Insurance Expiration Date

It started with a generator. I had bought one for home backup — just in case — and when it needed a repair, I couldn't find the receipt. The unit was still under warranty, but I couldn't prove it. It took nine months to track down the documentation, navigate the claim, and get the machine repaired. By the time I did, the warranty had nearly expired — and I had learned something about the quiet cost of disorganized ownership records.

That experience sat with me. Not as a dramatic crisis, but as a low-grade frustration I recognized from other contexts: the appliance that breaks just after the warranty window, the insurance policy that auto-renews at a worse rate because the renewal date crept up unnoticed, the car with a service interval approaching that nobody remembered to track. The information existed — somewhere — but nowhere useful.

Ortiki is the answer I built for that problem. Its name comes from the Quail — ortiki in Greek — and the small feather that curls above the bird's head like a perpetual reminder. That felt right. The app is not a productivity system or a filing cabinet. It is a quiet nudge — a reminder that sits in your pocket for all the things you own and insure, so that nothing slips past unnoticed.

What Ortiki does

Ortiki is a warranty, insurance, and home contents tracker. It centralizes the information that normally lives across a drawer full of receipts, a folder of PDFs, and a mental note you made to yourself three years ago: what you own, when you bought it, what it's covered by, and when that coverage expires.

The app tracks five categories of ownership:

• Vehicles — Make, model, VIN, purchase details, warranty terms, and mileage tracking for service intervals
• Electronics — Brand, serial number, purchase date and retailer, photos of the receipt and product, warranty duration
• Appliances — Same depth as electronics, with appliance-specific labeling and fields
• Insurance policies — Policy number, insurer, coverage type, premium, renewal date, policy documents, and a contents inventory for home policies
• Everything else — A flexible template for tools, furniture, or anything that doesn't fit neatly elsewhere

Each item has a tabbed detail view covering its overview, warranty terms, attached photos, documents, and service contacts. Every warranty and policy carries a status — Active, Expiring Soon, or Expired — color-coded throughout the app so that a glance at the dashboard tells you where the risk is.

How it was built

Ortiki was built entirely with AI assistance, using Claude as the primary development partner from the first screen mockup to the Google Play Store submission. There is no team. No agency. No prior mobile development background I was leaning on. The entire project — architecture, design, code, database schema, edge functions, documentation — came out of a conversational workflow between the problem I wanted to solve and the tools available to solve it.

The process started with mockups. Before writing a line of code, I designed eight HTML prototype screens covering every key flow: sign-up and onboarding, account and subscription management, product detail views for vehicles, electronics, and insurance, warranty status states, and mileage tracking. Those mockups became the visual specification that all subsequent development was built against.

The web version came first — a fully functional app accessible from any browser, no installation required. The native Android app followed, built with Expo and React Native. It added capabilities that a web app can't match: native push notifications, offline-first local storage with background sync to the cloud, and a production build submitted to the Google Play Store.

What building it taught me

The obvious lesson is that the barrier to building software has dropped dramatically. A problem that once required a development team, a design agency, and months of coordinated effort can now be worked through by one person with a clear idea and the patience to iterate. I am not a mobile developer by background. The codebase Ortiki runs on is not something I would have been able to produce five years ago.

But the less obvious lesson matters more for how I think about my professional work. AI-assisted development does not remove the need for judgment — it amplifies it. Every architectural decision, every data model, every UX flow still required someone to make a call about what mattered and what didn't. The offline-first architecture, the decision to build eight mockups before writing any code, the choice to implement guest mode as a first-class experience rather than an afterthought — none of those came from the tool. They came from understanding the problem well enough to know what the solution needed to be.

That's the same skill that governs MDM and data governance work. The platforms and frameworks change. What doesn't change is the discipline of defining the problem clearly, designing around real constraints, and building something that holds up when real people use it.