I Deleted Three Apps Off My Phone After Building This One

For a while I had a recipe app, a meal planner, and a separate shopping list app, and I still couldn't find anything when it actually mattered — standing in the kitchen, hands covered in flour, trying to remember which app had the recipe I wanted and whether I'd already written the ingredients into the shopping list or not.

None of them talked to each other. That's the actual problem, and it's a boring one, not a dramatic one, but it's the one that wore me down fastest. A recipe app is genuinely good at storing recipes. It has no idea what you're planning to cook this week. A meal planner is good at laying out a week of dinners, but it doesn't know your recipes and it can't turn them into a list. A shopping list app just sits there waiting for you to type things into it by hand, one at a time, usually while you're also trying to cook something. Each one does its one job fine. None of them know anything the others know, so you're the one carrying the information between them, every single time.

The specific moment that got to me: planning a week of dinners in one app, then copying every ingredient across into a shopping list by hand — recipe by recipe, line by line — and still ending up at the shops with a list that didn't quite match what I'd planned to cook. Small thing, repeated every week, and it adds up to wasted time and the wrong groceries.

So the actual design decision behind Logiciated wasn't "add more features." It was: what if these were never separate things to begin with? A photo of a dish becomes a recipe. A week of dinners is just those recipes dropped onto a calendar — the meal planner sits on the same data, not a separate app with its own login. And the shopping list writes itself from what you've planned, instead of waiting for you to type it. One set of information doing three jobs, instead of three apps each holding a piece of it and none of them talking.

I'm not going to pretend this is a groundbreaking insight. It's genuinely just: stop making the person be the integration layer between separate apps that don't talk to each other. That's it. That's the whole idea. I built it because I was the one doing the integrating, badly, every week, and I got tired of it.

Three apps deleted off my phone. One left. That's the actual measure of whether this worked, more than anything I could say about features.

— David