Alerta - Environmental sound awareness iOS app

My team and I worked on Alerta to help users stay aware of their surroundings. With six of us collaborating across design, coding, and project management, we built a tool that detects important environmental sounds and alerts the user through audio cues and custom haptic vibrations.

My Approach 

While the designers shaped the visuals and our project manager kept the timeline tight, my role as a coder was to build a solid and clean architecture. An app that listens continuously needs to be highly efficient. I made sure the background systems could handle audio processing and feedback delivery smoothly without slowing down the phone or draining the battery.

Vision and Innovation

Our shared goal was to push the limits of native iPhone hardware. By combining real time sound classification with dynamic vibrations and speech synthesis, we wanted to create a completely new way for people to understand their environment safely.

Identifying Unique Challenges

Dealing with continuous audio streams is tricky. The biggest technical challenge was combining the audio player, the speech synthesizer, and the haptic engine into one app. It was very easy for these hardware systems to conflict or cause errors if the code was not managed perfectly.

Resolving Complex Problems

I solved this by creating unified manager classes for both audio and haptics. I built a central service to handle all vibrations reliably. I also migrated the data storage to SwiftData. This makes saving user settings, slider values, and custom recorded vibration patterns fast and safe.

User Centric Design

From a coding perspective, a good user experience means a highly responsive app. When a user changes the voice speed on a slider or records a new haptic pattern, the code saves and applies the data instantly without requiring a manual save button.

Detailed Pages and Features

The app includes a live awareness screen with a dynamic voice orb, sound direction indicators, and live frequency bars. It also features a detailed settings section where users can adjust voice volume, choose custom alert sounds, and record their own vibration patterns from scratch.

Accessibility and Optimization

Alerta used native Apple frameworks like AVFoundation and SoundAnalysis to keep it highly optimized. The code is structured purely in SwiftUI to ensure the layouts adapt perfectly to different screen sizes while keeping the memory usage very low.

Conclusions

Building Alerta was a deep dive into advanced iOS capabilities. By working closely with my team to balance design and functionality, I was able to focus on strong code foundations, modern SwiftData management, and hardware integration. The final product is a fully working tool ready to help users in their daily lives.