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Rumboo App Logo
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App Screenshot (no frames)
Inspiration
I'm a passionate of travel and I like to plan and organize trips beforehand. I'm not the typical "spreadsheet" planner, but in a lightweight manner I like to have things sorted.
Usually I use tools like Google Docs, Notion, Google Maps and WhatsApp for trip planning, but when I tried to find one app for everything (or almost everything) I noticed the solutions out there were either way simple, or the learning curve was very steep and the UX poorly designed.
I wanted to create a solution that fills that exact gap. It may not be the "definitive" trip planning app, but the idea is to merge several tools you already use into just one app, then make it easy for you to use it as a source of truth in combination with other tools you already use.
What it does
Rumboo allows you to manage trips by adding places, flights, hotels, transportation and everything you want. Then you have everything easily accessible in a list or a map, and you can plan a day-by-day itinerary based on that, manually or with the help of AI.
On top of this, you can also invite your friends, setup a budget for the trip and add expenses related to the places you visited, so you can later on know who owes who and keep track of how much you spent.
Rumboo offers also a PRO version, that allows you to create unlimited trips, upload documents and much more. The free version is very usable and complete though, and there are no ads in any version.
How we built it
The app is built using React Native with Expo, as I wanted to use my existing React knowledge and learn a new framework, as well as release the app both for iOS and Android (in the end the app is only available for iOS as of now, since I wanted to offer the most polished native experience possible).
I've also used Cloudflare as an external API, Clerk for auth, PostHog for analytics and of course RevenueCat for subscription management.
Challenges we ran into
The most difficult part was the "shared trips". The app was meant to be simpler, but the biggest decision that made it a real product was including the option to share the trip with friends, which means it is necessary to keep track of every user action in a shared place, sync the trip state and avoid deadlocks or concurrency issues. This required a big architectural change and refactor, but it came with a lot of learnings along the way, so I'm pretty happy with the decision and the result!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The thing I like the most about the app is the native feeling. It has been designed around LiquidGlass, and every component and interaction has been designed to feel truly iOS native, despite having been built with React Native.
On top of that, one of the things that make Rumboo unique is the "offline-first" approach. Trip planning usually happens on planes, trains or hotels with poor internet connectivity. I wanted to let the user plan and check the trip details under almost any condition, and the data is silently uploaded once internet connection is back, so the backup is secure while you have always the most accurate version of your trip locally in your device.
What we learned
This is the first time I ship a native App, so I learnt the pains of setting everything up in the App Store, and also the first time I create a paid product, which means I had to also learn how to integrate the payments infrastructure and how to test everything properly to avoid issues with this, since money is what raises most complains among users!
What's next for Rumboo
I'm planning to keep updating the app. I'm only one person, and with the resources I have I think it'll be very difficult for Rumboo to become the "definitive" trip planning app, but the idea is to keep expanding it with cool features that makes sense, polish what is already there, and create an ecosystem around the current experience that allows users to export and import data from and to other tools so Rumboo can become the central single source of truth for your trips, not necessarily the "one and only" app for everything.
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