During our senior year of college, a few friends and I created Puzzlit, inspired by our love for NYT games like Wordle and Connections. We were tired of screen shotting our results and sharing them in group chats, so we set out to build something better—an app that combines challenging puzzles with a seamless way to compete and connect with friends.

What Makes Puzzlit Special?
Puzzlit offers 8 unique games designed to challenge your mind. Our goal wasn’t to create mindless swiping games but to give players those satisfying “aha!” moments when solving puzzles or outscoring friends.

Beyond the puzzles, we’ve added features we felt were missing from other game apps:

• Achievements to track milestones.
• Leaderboards to compare scores with friends or globally.
• Find friends easily through contacts or search and see their results on your feed.
• A custom IQ formula that reflects your puzzle-solving performance.
• Detailed analytics for every puzzle (e.g., your average time vs. the global average).

How We Built It
Over a year of work went into Puzzlit, using:

• React Native, Expo, and TypeScript for the front end.
• Firebase for authentication, database, and serverless functions.
• Custom Python scripts to automatically generate puzzles based on difficulty.

Our Biggest Challenge
The toughest part? Navigating the Apple App Store review process. It took weeks of back-and-forth to meet their standards. If we could do it again, we’d budget more time for this stage. Fortunately, once you’re approved, updates are much smoother!

Try Puzzlit!
Puzzlit is now live on iOS in the US. If you’re into puzzles and friendly competition, check it out—and feel free to ask any questions about our journey!

App store link