DinnerFlow A local-first meal planner for Android, built by BetuWorks. The product site is dinnerflow.app.
DinnerFlow is a meal planner for households. It stores your recipes, plans a week of dinners on a calendar, and turns that plan into a single grocery list. It has its own home at dinnerflow.app. This page is the studio's note on how it was built.
DinnerFlow is a local-first Android meal planning app made by BetuWorks, an independent studio in the Netherlands. It is free to download on Google Play.
Notes from the workbench
The decision that shaped everything else was making the phone's own database the source of truth rather than a cache. Recipes, the plan and the grocery list are written to SQLite on the device first; sync to a shared household library is a thing you switch on, not a precondition for the app working. The practical consequence is that DinnerFlow works in a supermarket basement with no signal, which is exactly where a grocery list is needed.
The hardest single part was importing a recipe from an arbitrary web page. The importer tries four strategies in descending order of reliability: structured recipe data first, then the page's framework payload, then embedded microdata, and finally a heuristic read of the HTML lists. Most cooking sites publish structured data and take the first path. The rest are the interesting ones.
One deliberate omission is worth recording. The grocery list combines identical ingredients and converts between compatible units, but it never silently merges two entries that merely look alike. “Appel” and “Appels” stay two lines until you say otherwise. An automatic merge that gets it wrong is worse than a duplicate you can see, because you only discover it at the shelf.
Specification
- Flutter · Dart · SQLite
- Android
- English, Nederlands, Deutsch, Español, Français
- Meal planning & groceries
- app.dinnerflow
- Published · Google Play