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An app that would let its users request and recieve services on demand. If like uber eats and facebook marketplace had a baby.

I started work on the frontend of the app using SwiftUI, and then made my way slowly to the backend.

Initially I did use Xcode storyboards, but I realized quickly that they are limited and were error prone.

So, the latter parts of this app were written purely using swift code. I found it to be a lot simpler to get changes into production and it was very pleasent using this approach over storyboards.

I learned how to to create backends using this app, it was the first application for which I created my own GraphQL backend! It was all done using AWS Amplify (Auth) and AWS AppSync.

Since it was the first time that I played around with setting an api, its safe to say I would not do it this way again.

Not only were the costs for test app around $60 a month, setting up dynamodb tables. SQS queues and so on. It was quite painful getting the code from my laptop to the cloud.

Tech stack

Frontend: iOS, SwiftUI

Backend: AWS, Serverless, GeoJSON Dynamodb database, cloudformation, AWS Cognito for authentication

API: Appsync GraphQL API

Pre-reqs

You will need an aws account to get the backend up and running.

You will need an Xcode enabled device to run the frontend.

Instructions

Start the backend using the rootStackTemplate.yaml file, it will auto generate the required files for you in the frontend app.

You can then follow the instructions inside Frontend/Readme.md to setup the remainder of the app.

Takeaways

Lots of fun building this app. I learned a lot (probably the most) about getting an application through all of its lifecycles. I got as far as putting in stripe for payments and took charge of the backend.

Things I would change:

• Need a clear vision of why this problem needed solving (Didnt do enough user testing :D)
• Build often, and mock things up (at the start of this project, Sketch was pretty new, there was no Figma, so next time around I would generally recommend using UI/UX mockup tools to get the feel right before coding things)
• Don't mix and match Infrastructure and Application code. I would not follow the same blueprint for creating this app. The backend would either be Django, Node, Ruby. Served via nginx to the frontend.
• Would probably end up containerizing parts of the backend
• Switch out dynamodb for mongodb (dynamo is an overkill)
• A RESTful API approach would be more preferable. Especially since I started to mix/match Stripe API endpoints as well.