Most pregnancy apps are built around one outcome. You enter a due date, and everything that follows assumes you will reach it, hold a healthy baby, and move smoothly into whatever the app calls the next stage. For a lot of pregnancies, that is exactly what happens, and the app works fine.
It is not what happens for everyone, and building Zorya honestly meant confronting a gap that most of this category quietly avoids.
The gap I noticed
I heard from women, during early conversations while building Zorya, about what happened to their data after a miscarriage or a stillbirth. In several of the apps they had used, the answer was somewhere between clumsy and cruel. Reminders kept arriving for appointments that would not happen. Weekly updates kept counting forward as though nothing had changed. In some cases, the only way to stop the notifications was to delete the entire record, weeks and weeks of tracked data, simply gone, with no way to keep any part of it.
That struck me as a real failure, not a small one. An app that only knows how to handle one outcome is not built for pregnancy. It is built for a specific, hoped for version of pregnancy, and it breaks, sometimes in genuinely painful ways, the moment reality does not match that version.
These were not isolated stories either. The more people I spoke with, the more I heard some version of the same experience, an app that had been a genuinely useful companion for weeks or months suddenly becoming a source of fresh distress at the worst possible time, simply because nobody had designed for anything other than the expected outcome.
Designing for an outcome nobody wants to plan for
This is a difficult thing to design for, because nobody wants to think about it while they are building or using an app meant to track something they hope goes well. But that discomfort is exactly why it needed deliberate attention rather than being left as an afterthought discovered only when someone needed it and found nothing there.
The approach we landed on was simple in concept, harder in execution: whatever happens, your record should remain intact, respectful, and entirely under your control. Not deleted by default. Not still sending cheerful weekly notifications as though nothing occurred. Just there, quiet, available if you want to look at it, easy to close if you do not.
What the archive actually does
When a pregnancy in Zorya does not continue as expected, the record moves into an archive rather than continuing to generate weekly content or reminders that no longer make sense. It stays complete, exactly as you left it, with everything you had logged up to that point still there. You can look at it whenever you choose. You can also simply leave it closed, for as long as you need, without the app pushing anything back at you in the meantime.
There is no forced flow through this. No survey asking you to categorize what happened. No suggested next steps or wellness content appearing uninvited. It is a record, held with the same care whatever it turned out to contain, waiting for you rather than the other way around.
You also keep full control over what happens next. Nothing is deleted automatically, and nothing is hidden from you either. If you want to export the record, as a PDF to keep or to bring to an appointment, you can. If you never want to open that part of the app again, it simply stays where it is, closed, without generating a single further notification.
Why this mattered more than any other feature
I built the kick counter and the contraction timer because pregnant people need practical tools for practical weeks. I built the archive because I could not, in good conscience, build an app that assumed every pregnancy ends the same way and then handled every other outcome as an edge case or a bug.
It is one of the quieter features in Zorya. Most people who use it hopefully never need to look at that part of the app the way it was designed to be looked at. But for the people who do, it was worth building carefully, and worth building before the app launched rather than added later once someone complained. Some things get built because a lot of people will use them every day. This was built because a smaller number of people would need it on one of the hardest days of their life, and it needed to be right when they did.
Odgovori