TL;DR — I built an app for the walking pad I bought to avoid health problems, and along the way I ended up creating two npm packages.
The Problem
As someone who has been working from home since the pandemic, sitting at a desk for extended stretches — often in a single long session — gradually led to back and lower-back pain in the short term, and a sedentary lifestyle in the long term.
So I started with a height-adjustable standing desk. The area where I live is perfect for outdoor walks in summer, but winters can be a bit restrictive. That made me consider putting a walking pad (treadmill) under the desk. Since it was going to be my first experience with one, I didn’t want to burn a hole in my wallet, so I bought a barely-known brand called TVDUGIM from someone who had used it for a while and wanted to get rid of it.
First Impressions
My initial experience was great. Especially during meetings where I wasn’t speaking and during long coding sessions, I didn’t even realize how much I was walking. The walking pad’s built-in display showed distance, calories, and elapsed time only for the current session — there was no recording functionality whatsoever. And I didn’t want to replace the walking pad just for that.
Down the Rabbit Hole
I noticed the walking pad could pair with devices over Bluetooth to play music. I thought maybe it was also broadcasting fitness data, so I connected it with a few different apps and found some unintelligible data streams. The constantly changing values seemed meaningless to me at first, but when I fed the problem to Claude Code, we managed to match the raw BLE data to the values shown on the device’s display through trial and error.
wPad
Naturally, the next thought was to turn this into a proper app — both for myself and for anyone else who might be facing the same problem. And that’s how wPad was born. You can find the app’s details and features on its App Store page.
Two More Tools Along the Way
During the development process, I also built two additional tools:
MCP App Store Connect
The first is an MCP server that lets Claude Code and other AI tools interact with App Store Connect on your behalf. It connects to App Store Connect directly and can perform a wide range of actions for you when submitting and managing your app. You can find the npm package and its documentation here.
iOS App Review Plugin
The second tool is a pre-review assessment utility. Before you submit your app for review, it scans your project against the App Store Review Guidelines and gives you an instant report — so you can fix issues before waiting for a response from the App Store review team (with the exception of certain topics, of course). This could save you a significant amount of time. I hope you find it useful. You can find the npm package and its details here.
If you encounter any issues with the packages, please don’t hesitate to reach out or open a GitHub issue directly.