Item — HN Reader

I have several 'home-cooked' apps. One is our shopping list. I have a Pi with a touchscreen in the kitchen running it, and it's easy for us both to add to from there. I also built in functionality so that if we're using a recipe from the web, we can share it to the screen, which is neat.

We can also access the shopping list on our phones while shopping. I built a feature that sorts the products by aisle (specific to our local supermarket), making it easier to do the shop easily/quickly.

I'm sure there are commercial (not even paid neccessarily) apps that do all this, but this one is used only by us and it's built to perfectly interact with our lives and circumstances:

* Things are hard-coded that would make no sense in a publicly available app, or would be very difficult to build customisation for. Hardcoding things is easy, building UI is hard. We're so used to building things in the commercial space for scale we forget how easy it is to build small things that will never need to scale beyond a userbase of 1-2.

* It has remained almost entirely unchanged in UI and features for ~10 years now. Can you say that of any other piece of software you use on a daily basis?

2 comments

> I'm sure there are commercial (not even paid necessarily) apps that do all this, but this one is used only by us and it's built to perfectly interact with our lives

There is another factor you may not be aware of: shopping apps are juicy targets for acquisition by marketing/data mining company. I mean, there is no clearer indication of what you want to buy than what you put in your shopping list, so it's perfect source of data to mine.

Out of milk is such an example: it was a good app with 5 million users, then it got sold. Users became the subjects of data mining, or their account got deleted (if in Europe). Fun!

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inmarket-acquires-o...

https://twitter.com/JamesLiamCook/status/1407370148349198341

wow that app is taking a nosedive in the reviews https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.capigami.o...

I've been curious if the play stores etc of the world would mind supporting some kind of banner or other notification for when apps change hands between owners. Something to tip them off to the fact that the app is now under new management, much like how restaurants hang banners when new management takes over a spot. Now that I think about it I wonder why restaurants even feel it warranted to notify the public, must have some positive image optimism behind it I guess or is it something regulated perhaps?

> it's built to perfectly interact with our lives and circumstances:

this is it right here! I've been contemplating getting an old Android tablet just to run some home-cooked app. Would be nice if iOS devices could support side loading of apps, but I'm cool having an Android device just for running these focused apps and that alone.