Does Your Dog Need a Tamagotchi?

Three weeks ago I skipped my dogs' walks for a few days and one of them redecorated the living room. I wrote about it, and if the conversations I have with clients are anything to go by, most of you have done the same thing and not noticed until the dog made you notice.

That got me thinking about a feature. I want to put it in front of you before I build anything, because I have built things nobody wanted before, and it costs time I do not have.

The idea

If you had a Tamagotchi in the nineties you already know the shape of it. A little creature on a screen. You feed it, you play with it, you clean up after it. Neglect it and it gets sad, then ill, then it dies and you cry in a maths lesson.

Now imagine that, but the creature is your actual dog, and the screen is a widget on your phone's home screen.

• The app reminds you to walk. Not at a fixed time, but based on when the last walk was and roughly how much your dog needs.
• It keeps a simple log of how much exercise and brain work he has had this week.
• It shows a small avatar of your dog. When his needs are met, he looks like himself. When the walk slides, his mood drops. You would see it every time you unlocked your phone.
• One day, it could read a smart collar or a GPS tracker, so the walk counts because it happened, not because you remembered to log it.

So, a dog on your home screen who looks a bit fed up when you have not taken him out.

The case for

A dog's needs are easy to miss. A dog who has not been walked for two days looks, from the sofa, like a dog who is asleep. You only find out at six o'clock, as a chewed line or a stolen sock, and by then you are treating the symptom.

A widget does not train the dog. It just puts the missing walk where you will see it before the dog has to tell you.

I also think people are better at looking after things than they are at looking after themselves. Most of the owners I work with would not skip a walk if they had properly registered that they were skipping it. The problem is never that they do not care. The problem is that three busy days blur into one, and the dog was fine in the garden, and you know how that ends. I know how that ends, because it ended with my sofa.

For households with two or more dogs, or two or more humans, it is also a shared record. Who took him out? Did anyone? Nobody has to ask.

And the collar part, if it ever happened, would fix the biggest weakness of the whole idea.

The case against

It is only as good as what you log. If you have to open the app and tap "walked, forty minutes" every time, the widget is measuring how diligent you are with your phone, not how much your dog moved. The person who most needs the reminder is the person least likely to log anything. Until the collar bit exists, that is a real hole in the idea, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

A sad cartoon dog could nag. There is a fine line between a helpful nudge and something that just makes you feel bad, and I do not fully trust myself to stay on the right side of it. I built a training app with streaks and levels because they work. But a streak you break is a number. A drawing of your own dog looking miserable is something else. Some people would find that motivating. Some would find it unbearable and delete the app, which helps nobody, least of all the dog.

It could also become the thing you look at instead of the dog. The dog is asleep on the floor next to you. His body tells you whether he has had enough today, if you know how to read it, and there is a guide to that in the app. I would hate to build something that trained people to check a phone before they checked the animal.

And it is one more thing to keep up. The app already plans your training and tracks your sessions. Every feature I add is a little more to look at, and the less there is to look at in Titan, the better it works.

What I am not saying

I am not announcing anything. There is no date, there is no design, and there might never be, depending on what you tell me. The app today plans your training, tracks your progress and coaches you through it. You can read about what it does now. It does not watch your walks.

What I am doing is asking, because I have learned that guessing what owners want and building it in a dark room is how you end up with a very nice feature that nobody opens.

So: I have told you the honest case for it and the honest case against. The trainer who forgot his own dogs' walks thinks he would use it. He is also aware that he would be the one building it, which is not the same thing.

Would you use a walk reminder that shows your dog's mood, or would it just nag you?