u/Adorable_Body4794

I’m a dialysis patient and I recently launched my first-ever iOS app two weeks ago. I built it specifically for people on dialysis (and their caregivers) to help make daily life a bit more manageable.

It’s currently live in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Japan App Stores, and I’m actively adding more localization. The response from the few people who’ve found it has been positive, but overall visibility has been almost zero.

I’ve tried a few patient communities on Reddit and Facebook, but most immediately flag it as advertising, so I completely understand and respect the rules.

I’m not here to spam my link — I’m genuinely looking for advice from people who’ve successfully promoted niche/health-related apps:

• What avenues actually worked for you?
• Are there specific subreddits, forums, patient groups, or strategies that are more open to this kind of thing?
• Any tips on reaching fellow dialysis/kidney patients without coming across as promotional?

Any guidance would be hugely appreciated. This app was built out of real lived experience, so I really want to get it in front of the people who could actually benefit from it.

Thank you 🙏

Hey everyone. I'm Mike — I was diagnosed with PKD at 36 and I've been on PD (cycler at night, manual exchanges during the day) since. Currently working through the transplant evaluation process on my third center.

Like a lot of you, I tried tracking my sessions, vitals, labs, meds, and fluid intake with everything I could find. Apple Health. Spreadsheets. Paper logs. My clinic's patient portal (which was basically a website pretending to be an app). Nothing worked the way I needed it to — they were either too generic to understand what a manual exchange even is, or they required so many taps that logging a session at midnight after 10 hours on the cycler felt like a second job.

So I built my own app. I'm a software engineer by day and I figured if nobody was going to build what we actually need, I'd do it myself.

It's called **KidneyKind** and it's on the App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch. Here's what it does:

- **Tracks all four modalities** — PD manual, PD cycler, home HD, and clinic HD. It actually knows what UF means, what drain appearance is, what a fill volume is. Not a generic "log your treatment" text box.
- **Daily vitals** with trend charts over time — BP, weight, fluid intake, temperature, pulse, symptoms
- **Lab results** with reference range flags — so you can see at a glance what's in target and what's not
- **Medications** with schedules and reminders — because 10+ meds is the reality for most of us
- **Fluid intake** — one-tap logging from the home screen or your Apple Watch. Cup of water at 2 AM? One tap on your wrist.
- **Care team contacts** — your nephrologist, PD nurse, dietitian, transplant coordinator all in one place with tap-to-call
- **Transplant journey tracker** — evaluation checklist, listing status, PRA history, coordinator contact. The roadmap I wished someone had given me when I started.

Everything is private — your data stays in your own iCloud. I don't collect anything. No ads. No selling your health data. That was non-negotiable.

I showed it to my nephrologist and he said he hadn't seen anything like it, especially the transplant tracker. Said he could look at a patient's phone and understand what's going on in 3 minutes.

There's a **14-day free trial** so you can try everything before deciding. Even if you cancel, you keep read-only access to all the data you entered — I'm not going to lock a dialysis patient out of their nephrologist's phone number because of a billing issue.

**App Store link:** https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kidneykind/id6761937176

**Website:** https://kidneykindapp.com

I'm around if you have questions. I know what it's like to be on this side of the disease, and I built this for all of us.