Inspiration
This year, my wife and I got married and moved in, it was the first time either of us were living away from our families. And every night we asked each other the same question, “What’s for dinner?”, spending more time deciding than actually cooking.
We started sending each other Instagram reels for recipes, and that’s all our recommendations feed is now. But those fancy meals barely made it out of Instagram for us, and we needed a better system.
And whenever it was dinner time, we would usually go to Google and try to search for what to cook.Are some specific recipes, but what we soon realized was that on Google, you don't get actual good or real recipes. On Google, you get a bunch of SEO slop, which is only competing to rank at the top of the page and not actually helping the users.
My wife also started getting ads for the recipe builder apps, and we tried a few of those, but none of those actually worked for us, everything had a long calorie counting onboarding or a recipe app that’s completely empty and you’re supposed to do the work of adding your recipes manually.
And we started thinking of a solution, something that could work for us, and that's when we came up with Ryce.
What it does
Ryce is a simple, welcoming, and delightful app that takes care of your cooking and nutrition, It doesn't set hard goals for you to achieve or a stringent meal plan. With Ryce, you can describe what you're craving, and it will come up with the recipe. Or, if you see something on Instagram, you can use the share extension and directly share it with Ryce, which converts it into a complete recipe breakdown, and you can start cooking from there.
Not just that, whatever recipe you add to Ryce, it would gently nudge you to make that meal more balanced, perhaps by adding some more protein or fiber, but Ryce doesn't judge. It gives you a nudge at the end of the recipe page, and if you wish, you can slightly customize it, making it more balanced.
At its homepage, you just see what your next meal is going to be, don’t fancy it? There’s a shuffle button.
And for the times when you are not cooking (perhaps you are eating out at a restaurant or eating some of yesterday's leftovers), you can simply use the "Check My Plate" feature. Ryce would give you a slight nudge on what you might want to add to the dish to make it more balanced. You can arrange all your recipes into neat folders, and when it's time to cook, cooking mode gives you step-by-step instructions with voice commands, so you're not touching your phone with messy hands. If you have someone else looking for you, you can simply share it as a well-structured message or a voice note.
Discover (my personal favourite) section is for when you wanna break out of your routine and try something new, Discover section contains Recipe Packs, which are handcrafted by us - with new packs every week, you’ll never run out of options. It also comes with a globe feature, you can spin the globe around, tap on any region and it will give you a recipe from there.
How we built it
Me and wife had been brainstorming the basic idea behind Ryce for months now, and with Shipaton, I know it was the perfect opportunity to bring this project to life. Ryce started on Figma, with 100s of options inspirations and directions I wanted to take and we had a few frontrunners. I realized the dishes would look the best if it's a top-down shot, as compared to anything else, and that's how I wanted all the recipes to look.And I knew that it had to be a very colorful UI because food, for me, is kind of an emotion, and I didn't want it to be bland. Here’s some of the inspirations i wanna give a a shoutout to -
If I keep adding links, then it would be hundreds of them, but these two really took it for me: a beautiful-looking dish sitting down on a vibrantly colorful background. That's the whole vibe I wanted for my app.
here's how Apple Music inspired my design. https://d112y698adiu2z.cloudfront.net/photos/production/software_photos/005/480/883/datas/small.png
Ryce is built for iOS natively using SwiftUI. I wanted this app to feel at home with the Apple platform, so we've built share extensions, live activities, delightful widgets, and app intents that work with Siri integrations. And, of course, RevenueCat for handling all the subscriptions
Challenges we ran into
For me, the hardest challenge was to come up with the tone and aesthetic for the app, and make it something which looks apart from the hundreds of similar apps. And I didn’t want it to look like a vibe-coded project, so it had to be well thought out, every placement of every UI had to be from a human angle. I’m happy to have opened the Testflight beta early which gave me a lot of feedback from my early users.
Few more challenges I faced was with App Intents and Siri Integration, because this Shipaton period was in sync with the iOS beta program, i had to work with the new Siri - which barely behaved like it was supposed to, and I was stuck debugging endlessly.
Another challenge - I’m ashamed to admit was the AppIcon and the AppStore screenshots. I had put in so much of my creativity, and the results are well worth it? Maybe or maybe not, I still want to run a A/B Test and see what works.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
While Ryce is a Shipaton project, I also participated with Ryce in another hackathon (also sponsored by RevenueCat) in India called “Indehub”, one of the biggest mobile hackathon and WON! I’m also incredibly proud of the initial reaction to all the users I show this app to. It feels like everyone thinks this app looks refreshing, and creative, while it’s not perfect, i think it’s a great starting point. And AppStore screenshots - some of the biggest names I look up to have appreciated my screenshots design.
What we learned
We learnt that it’s not actually that easy to build and publish a really good app, despite what all the AI influencers want you to believe, while the process of building and iterating has become faster, still at the core, you have to think about the product and user experience.
I learnt alot about distribution and user retention, just by listening to RevenueCat’s livestreams this past month, and I learned that you have to be obsessed with giving the users a really good experience.
What's next for Ryce: Cook delicious recipes
In the discover section I will keep dropping new recipe packs every week without fail, that’s kinda the biggest idea behind Ryce, giving it a humanistic touch. I want Ryce users to have a great experience wherever they are in the world, and my ambition is to localise all the recipes, and the entire app to all supported languages in the world. I’m in process of building an iMessage bot that links to the Ryce’s backend and the user’s meal plan so it can nudge you simply through a messaging app. Biggest feature that Ryce is missing is a CloudKit support to sync your recipes across all your devices while keeping it private.
And before the iPhone Duo ships this month, I want my app to support that device natively, so alot of work will go there.
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