Breathe.

Screenshots of a mobile diving app displaying dive logs, history, and details, with underwater scenes and dive data graphs.

The risk

My partner and I quit our jobs and left our home to travel the world and build an app.

Breathe is a digital logbook, allowing divers to log dives, track the equipment, add their certifications, and view a comprehensive history of their dives. Version 1 was designed and developed over 6 months while we travelled around the world.

We visited renowned diving spots to met dive shop owners and instructors as well as many recreational scuba divers - our users.

At the time there were very few digital dive log apps - they were either super technical or not technical enough. The leaders in the industry, PADI, had a 2.0 app store rating.

Digital screen displaying a dive equipment management interface with a human figure in diving gear, including a buoyancy vest, fins, mask, snorkel, and tank, against an underwater background.

Being reactive

Originally we planned to create a dive timer app, which would inform divers when it was safe to do their next dive in terms of pressure limits. It became apparent that this was very technical and would be too risky as getting it wrong could result in serious injury for divers.

But during this research we quickly identified several problems with the current system of having a physical paper dive log book to record information about each dive - it was often lost or forgotten, and that all that rich information regarding dive sites was then lost forever or discarded.

The digital logbook worked much better as a concept - paper dive logbooks are an antiquated system, and hold a well of untapped information about dive sites around the world.

Three mobile app screens for scuba diving: the first shows equipment management options including suit and tank settings, the second shows diving hand signals for communication, the third displays a world map with dive site markers.

Breathe goes on

Breathe is currently the No 1 scuba dive log app in many countries around the world.

We are gathering data from our daily active users in order to feed that back to the diving community in future versions. The next step is to launch an Android version and localise the app for different markets.

We continue to get great and informative feedback from the international diving community which informs the decisions made about the product.

If you want to hear more about this case study, please contact me.

Two scuba divers underwater taking a selfie, making the 'OK' hand gesture, with a coral reef in the background.

UK app store review

“A great example of modern tech surpassing an out-of-date system.”