Recipe Box is a small Android app for people who cook at home. It keeps the dishes you actually make, turns them into a plan for the week and builds the shopping list from that plan. It is free, has no ads and works offline.
The interesting part of this release isn't what we added. It's what we took out to get it shipped.
Cut one: the AI
The first version of this project was "an AI meal planner". The AI features came with a server, an API bill that grows with every user, and a privacy policy explaining where your food diary goes.
When we sat down to decide what to release, the honest question was: what does the person standing at the fridge at 7 pm actually need? The answer wasn't a generated recipe from a stranger's cuisine. It was "remind me of the things I already know how to cook".
So "Suggest a dish" now draws only from your own library. You swipe right to plan it, left to skip. There's no model and no network call, and every idea is a dish you already know how to make.
Cut two: the mandatory login
The original design put a Google sign-in first. That's a wall in front of an app nobody has tried yet.
Now everything lives on the phone. Sign-in is still there, but only for syncing and backup, and the app explains it in those words. Your recipes don't need an account to exist.
Cut three: iOS, for now
The codebase is Flutter, so an iPhone build is close. But every platform we ship is a platform we answer reviews, crashes and store policy on. We'd rather learn on one store first.
What stayed, and got more careful
Once the scope was small, the details had room to be right.
Units that add up. Ingredients use real units (grams, millilitres, cups, spoons, pinches, "to taste") instead of free text. That's what makes the weekly shopping list useful: 800 g of tomatoes for soup plus 300 g for a salad becomes one line, "1.1 kg", not two. Fractions work the way people type them: 1/2, 1 1/2, 0,5 on a European keyboard.
A picture without a photo. Most people never photograph their dinner, so most recipe cards in an app like this are blank. Recipe Box reads the dish name ("Chicken curry", "Борщ", "Lemon cheesecake") and picks a matching icon and colour. You can override the guess with one tap, or choose "not set" if it's wrong. Sixteen dish types, English and Russian keywords, and a test suite full of traps like eggplant (a vegetable, not an egg).
The week at a glance. Breakfast, lunch and dinner for seven days, with a dot row that shows which days still need a plan.
The launch checklist, for the next app
Things that took longer than the code:
- Store screenshots from real data. We added a build flag that seeds a fresh install with a dozen dishes and a planned week, so the screenshots show a used app instead of empty states.
- Legal pages before the listing. Privacy, terms and a data deletion page went up first, because Google Play asks for their URLs in the forms.
- Console-only forms. Content rating, target audience and data safety can't be filled through the Play API. They're quick, but budget time for them.
Recipe Box is our first release in a category we've wanted to try for a while. We'll write about what the numbers say once it's been live for a few weeks.