Software · Design
Mealer
A two-sided mobile marketplace connecting home cooks with hungry diners.
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Designer & Android Developer
- Team
- 4-person team
- Context
- Course project (Group 27)
- Stack
- Android Studio, Java, Firebase, Figma
The premise
Mealer is a two-sided app: cooks list dishes they make at home, clients browse and order them. Two account types, two flows, one shared object — the meal. We built it as a final project for a software engineering course, end-to-end on Android.
Two roles, one app
Both cook and client begin at the same login screen but immediately diverge. Cooks land in a dashboard for managing dishes and orders; clients drop into a discovery feed grouped by cuisine and meal type. Keeping the two flows visually identical at the shell level — same nav, same colour, same type — meant we could share a lot more code than we expected.
Discovery, not search
Most food apps default to a search bar. Ours leads with cuisines and meal types — Italian, Mexican, Breakfast, Lunch — because that's how people actually decide what they want. The search bar is there, but it earns its keep behind the categories instead of dominating the screen.
Building it
Java and Android Studio for the app, Firebase for auth and the meal database, Figma for the screens. The biggest engineering lift was modeling the order state machine — a meal moves through several states before the client receives it, and both sides of the marketplace need to see the right view at the right time.
What I'd do differently
Tighter image discipline (each cuisine icon was sourced separately and it shows), a real design token system instead of repeating hex values across screens, and a single source of truth for order states instead of recomputing it in three places.