The challenge

The goal for the design and implementation of this app was to allow users to easily find somewhere to eat that offers a good selection of gluten-free food. Whilst there are a couple of other apps that offer this service, I felt there was room for improvement both in design and the quality of the results returned.

In 2018, Google substantially increased the cost of using their 'Places' and 'Maps' APIs, so where they may have previously been the obvious choice for obtaining data, other options would now need to be explored.

The result

The resulting application uses a very simple UI, with three menu icons allowing the user to view their favourites, the search page, or their settings. Due to the increase in price for using Google data, it was decided that it would be best to build a database of restaurants from scratch. Not only will be more cost-effective moving forward, but it will also give a greater degree of control over the quality of the data.