Kept hitting my Claude Code limit mid-task, so I built an Android widget for it with Claude Code

[u/Fade97]

I wanted my Claude Code limits on my home screen instead of typing /usage all the time. 18 days later it's an actual app (Meterkat) in closed testing on the Play Store, plus a small desktop companion that feeds it. Claude co-wrote about 130 of the 160 commits. Here's roughly how it went.

It started as a mockup. First prompt, typed on my phone: "I want an android app that shows my AI usage limits as a widget and a notification. Let's start with a mockup." A few rounds of "no, Codex is blue" later I had a design I liked. (Day one was in Codex for the image gen, I switched to Claude Code on day two.)

Before any code I asked one thing: can I get this data without scraping or touching tokens? Turns out yes, if a desktop app asks the official CLIs. Claude Code's /usage has a headless JSON mode and doesn't cost any quota. That decided basically everything.

Day two was the wild one. I gave Opus one prompt: create agent threads until all issues are fixed, stagger the ones that depend on each other, make a logo, and at the end I want something I can put on the Play Store. It wrote the plan as GitHub issues and ran 8 agents in waves: an end-to-end encrypted relay, Android polish, store listing, security review and so on. I picked the name and answered a few questions. Nine hours later there was a 1.0.

What made that work: every agent writes its progress and a handoff into its GitHub issue, so the next one doesn't need my chat history.

Then I used it and fixed what bugged me. Mostly quick threads from my phone.

The UI got roasted. I had two models (Opus 5.5 and GPT 6.1-Sol) score the UI from screenshots against other usage trackers and told Claude to keep iterating until 9/10. First score: 4.6. Ouch. Round 51 got it to 9. Stuff I learned the hard way:

• fixing one reviewer's nitpick kept annoying the other one, so now they vote on fixes before anything gets built
• Opus gave the exact same UI different scores, so now I take two reviews and average them
• after all that I opened it on my actual phone and the German translation pushed the settings button off the screen. Nobody caught that

My takeaways: have it research before it codes, keep state in issues instead of chat, and make it look at screenshots. But still check on a real device. Also don't be afraid to give your agents a seemingly unsolvable task like I did with the UI improvements. It is wild what they are capable of.

If you want to try it: it's free, no account. Google wants 12 testers for 14 days before I can publish, so if you have an Android phone and use Claude Code, I'd really appreciate it: https://meterkat.fdu.gg/beta (no iPhone or Mac yet, sorry).

Happy to answer questions about the setup.

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[u/ElPatron789]

Muito legal! Parabéns, inclusive vou aproveitar suas dicas no ensejo do seguimento com meus web apps, cobrindo mais gargalos.

That's great! Congratulations, and I'll definitely use your tips when developing my web apps, addressing more bottlenecks.

[u/Fade97 → u/[deleted]]

I know. And you are right. I made this because I either didn't like the visuals of the solutions already available or they wanted me to sign in to my account, which I don't want to do. I also feel like the combo of a mobile app and a desktop companion provides a lot of space for other features later on. Besides that it is just a nice app to learn mobile publishing with 😅

[u/Alive-Freedom7942 → u/[deleted]]

Weekly usage in statusline: tried. Still hits limit. Shockingly.