Rootsy is a community-driven recipe and meal planning app that brings people together around food. Users can discover recipes, save and remix them, plan weekly meals, and auto-generate grocery lists — all synced across devices. The app integrates with OpenAI to suggest recipes based on what's in your fridge, dietary preferences, and seasonal availability.
The social layer is at the heart of the product: users can follow each other, comment on recipes, share their weekly meal plans, and take part in community cooking challenges. Think Pinterest meets a personal chef meets a grocery list app.
Building a cross-platform mobile app with React Native and Expo required careful attention to native module compatibility, especially for camera access (ingredient scanning), push notifications, and gesture handling. I used Expo Router for file-based navigation and Reanimated 3 for fluid 60fps animations that feel native on both iOS and Android.
The GraphQL API (Apollo Server) was designed with a subscription layer so that social actions — likes, comments, new followers — arrive in real time. I used AWS AppSync for the managed subscription infrastructure and DynamoDB as the primary data store for its horizontal scalability at social-graph scale.
Rootsy features AI-powered recipe suggestions based on fridge contents, weekly meal planner with drag-and-drop, auto-generated shareable grocery lists, ingredient barcode scanning, social feed with follows and comments, cooking challenges and leaderboards, offline support with sync on reconnect, and deep-link support for recipe sharing.