Brain-Body Therapy guides you through a workout and two short counseling talks to settle anxiety. We inherited the build with a video engine that crashed mid-session, stabilized it, and shipped the redesigned version 2.0 the app runs on today.
Founder Rio Wilson spent five years building a method that pairs movement with counseling. The app first launched in October 2025. Each session opens with a check-in, moves into a guided workout for anxiety or low mood, and closes with a reflection. The idea is specific: use exercise to settle the nervous system, then talk it through while the body is still calm.
It runs on a subscription, so every session has to feel dependable. That is the whole problem. The counseling talks and the workouts are guided videos, so when playback fails, the session fails with it. When we took over, playback failed often.
A short counseling video and a mood check set the intention for the session.
A guided video workout, cardio, strength or stretching, matched to how you feel that day.
A closing talk and reflection, landing while the body is calm from the movement.
The founder's flow was the part that worked: a warm welcome, a clinically-informed assessment, then a program built around your answers. We preserved all of it and replaced the shaky engineering it stood on. This is the journey a new user actually walks through.
Screens are the app's own App Store creative. The wellness claims on them are the founder's, not AppMakers.
A wellness app that crashes during a breathing exercise loses you in the exact moment it is built to help. We inherited one that did.
The app is meant to take a jittery nervous system and settle it. The engineering was the same shape of problem. We took a crash-prone video engine and made it steady. The line below is both stories at once: erratic on the left, where we started, smooth on the right, where it runs now.
The crash markers are real failure modes we fought: initialization races, mid-playback crashes, and state desyncs when a screen remounted. To a user they looked random. That was the tell. We treated every random crash as a deterministic bug we had not reproduced yet.
Video is the spine of Brain-Body Therapy, and React Native's video stack is fragile once real use hits it. People background the app mid-clip, the network flaps, formats vary, someone seeks halfway through. Each is a chance for the player to lose its place or die.
So we stopped calling the crashes random. We reproduced them one at a time until the whole engine went quiet.
We did not write this app and could not start over. We were asked to preserve much of the existing design and user flow, so the work was surgical: hold the experience the founder wanted on the surface, and replace the shaky engineering underneath it. That is the constraint founders underestimate in a rescue. You are handed someone else's decisions and asked to make them stable.
This build changed our advice. If video is core to your product, weigh React Native carefully before you commit, because you will spend more time stabilizing the player than building features around it. If you are already on it, budget far more time for player stability than the timeline suggests. That lesson came straight out of this rescue.
Staring at an app a previous team built that keeps crashing?
Book a Free App Audit →You cannot redesign on top of an app that crashes. Once playback held, we shipped version 2.0 for Mental Health Awareness Month. It reorganized each day into three clear steps and added the features that turn one good session into a daily habit. Scroll to walk through them.
Every day is a pre-workout check-in, a guided workout, and a closing talk, with a class library to replay any of them.
A home-screen progress bar plus time spent, streaks, and pre and post-workout scores across the whole program.
Animated celebration screens that mark showing up, because starting is the hardest part of the habit.
Pick the days and times that fit your week, and gentle nudges bring quiet users back.
A built-in zones guide plus a screen-off cardio timer keep every workout at the right intensity.
Across 25 ratings, with reviews pointing straight at the thing the app was built to do.
App Store, July 2026Seven new features and the redesigned three-step session, released for Mental Health Awareness Month.
Announced via PRNewswire, May 2026The v2.0 launch was covered by PRNewswire, Bustle, Gadgetgram, and the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Public coverage, 2025 to 2026"This update is about giving users a sustainable way to care for their mental health, with structure and support."
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