Build journal — Verge, week 1 of beta

The first week of Verge beta is in the books. Some quick notes from the build side.

What went well

• Onboarding flow held up. Average time-to-first-baseline was 4 minutes. Target was under 10. Win.
• Apple Watch live integration was rock-solid. Zero reports of dropped streams. Watch + iPhone state syncing through WatchConnectivity was the biggest engineering risk; it just worked.
• People understood the contextual baseline immediately. Worried about explaining "your normal at 9am sedentary is different from 4pm post-coffee." Turns out traders get it instantly — they already know they're different people at different times.

What broke

• The first overnight HealthKit backfill on iOS 18.4 hung on three devices. Fixed with a 30s timeout and graceful degradation.
• Garmin folks were disappointed it's HealthKit-only. Knew this was coming; rolling out the proper native bridge is post-beta.
• One tester triggered an edge case in the trade-correlation card by tagging 200 trades in a single session. Throttled the rebuild to once-per-minute.

What surprised me

Traders are sharing the app with their wives. Not friends. Wives. Multiple unprompted messages saying "I showed my partner what this does and she said 'finally, something that watches you while you do this stuff'." I didn't see that coming and I'm thinking about it.