In 2020, I took a Udemy course called “Kotlin masterclass” and created my first app in the programming language Kotlin. The idea to create Receptappen (“The Recipe App” in Swedish) came from reading an FB post about an acquaintance needing a customizable recipe app, and my need for an ad-free shopping list app. I found the challenge of learning a new coding language with a set goal quite fun, and so the project was started. The course and app took me 3 weeks to finish – the first version of Receptappen was later removed from Google Play as I had not updated it for some time (5 years is an insane amount of time in the app and coding world).
6 years later, it was time to give the app a face lift – and this time, instead of coding everything from scratch (rewarding as that was), I stood for ideation and Claude Code for the coding.
New in Receptappen v2
- Importing recipes via shared links and images: using ML Kit and OCR, the app saves recipes shared via other apps (e.g. links from a mobile browser or Instagram).
- Saving recipes, menus and shopping items into an external file (instead of local storage as before); allows for reinstalling the app in a new mobile using saved data.
- New design (the old was eh, a bit dated)
Then and now, the app is for all those who want to customize their recipes and menus from scratch, and have a shopping list to which you can add items directly from the recipes themselves. Future improvements include being able to customize the app design and color theme.
What previously took 3 weeks, now took a casual afternoon with an LLM tool. One might argue I lose the oversight and control of the code base if I let an LLM do the work; I would argue that the time I save from coding, is time I can put on reading and understanding the code, and working on feature improvements.
Curious to know more about how I designed the app, or app features? Drop me a line.