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Five-button phone app for grandma, built with Claude
Five giant buttons in her own language, one link to set up, and a help button that opens WhatsApp with the message already typed.
My grandma asks me the same five phone questions every week. So I built her an app with exactly five buttons. That's the whole idea, and the reel shows it.
This is day six of my challenge. A wheel picks what I build, I get one spin, and there are no rerolls. It landed on "I Built My Grandma An App", so that's what I built.
The five buttons
The app has five giant buttons, in her own language. They are call me, video call, today's medicines, photos and help.
Nothing else is on the screen. The point is that there's nothing to get lost in.
Help is the one I care about most. It opens WhatsApp with "I need help" already typed. She presses send, and the message comes straight to my phone. I know the moment she's stuck, and she doesn't have to explain what's on her screen or how she got there.
That replaces the calls that start with "beta, ye kya hai?"
How it got built
I'm using Claude, an AI that writes code. I described the five buttons in plain words, and it built the whole app. I didn't write the layout or wire up the buttons myself.
For a small, fixed spec like this, that works well. Five buttons with one job each is easy to describe, so there's little room for the description to go wrong. If you try the same thing, keep the list that short.
The buttons also work in all twenty-two official Indian languages. So the app isn't tied to my grandma's language. You can make one for anyone in your family.
Setting it up for someone else
Setup needs no app store. You type her details on your phone and send her one link. She taps it once, and the five buttons stay on her home screen.
So the person doing the setup is you, not her. She never has to fill in a form or find anything to install. Nothing is uploaded either.
The screens in the reel are test runs of the real app. The real test was grandma's first try, and that's the part at the end of the video.
What to try
Think of the one person in your family who calls you for phone help. Write down the five things they ask for most, in plain words, the way you'd say them out loud. That list is the spec. If you want the link for your family, comment GRANDMA on the reel, and send it to the cousin who never picks up when grandma calls.
