Project — Product & Software Engineering

Worldwide: An AI-Assisted Travel Planning App

Solo project · React Native / Expo, Supabase, Claude API, Google Places API · 2026 · Submitted to the App Store

Worldwide feed screen — Social feed — public and followed trips

Worldwide swipe discovery screen — Swipe-based place discovery

Worldwide itinerary builder screen — Day-by-day itinerary builder

React Native / Expo Supabase (Postgres, RLS, Edge Functions) Claude API Google Places API EAS Build / OTA Updates

The Brief

Worldwide is a social, AI-assisted travel-planning app: swipe-based place discovery, day-by-day itinerary building, an AI assistant that helps route multi-city trips, and collaborative planning with friends. I designed, built, and shipped it entirely solo — the mobile app, the backend, the data pipeline behind it, and the full App Store submission.

My Role

Everything, end to end. Mobile app architecture (React Native / Expo Router), backend schema and security (Supabase/Postgres with row-level security and admin-gated functions), a cost-aware data pipeline for sourcing and curating real place data at scale, and the full Apple App Store submission process — encryption export compliance, EU trader declarations, App Privacy data-collection disclosures, and the age rating questionnaire.

Engineering Highlights

Cost-aware, tiered data pipeline: built a Google Places import system with two tiers — full category sweeps for flagship trip cities, and lightweight curated-icon passes for secondary cities — to maximize real-world coverage against a fixed API budget (worked out to roughly $0.026 per imported place at scale, informing a global rollout plan covering dozens of cities).
Root-caused a genuinely subtle deep-link race condition: password-reset links were silently failing. The actual cause was that iOS only delivers a deep link's one-shot event to whichever listener registers first — always the persistent root layout, mounted before any destination screen ever gets a chance to. Fixed by moving recovery-link handling to the root and passing the result down via context, instead of having the destination screen chase an event it could never win.
Designed a safe OTA update strategy the hard way: an early version re-checked for updates on every app foreground, which could reload the app mid-navigation and corrupt in-flight state. Replaced it with a single check-and-gate at cold boot, before any screen renders — slower to propagate to an already-open session, but structurally incapable of interrupting one.
Full RLS-secured backend: row-level security policies, admin-only SECURITY DEFINER RPCs for moderation actions, and a redacted itinerary view so non-owners never see another user's private booking details or notes.
Shipped it for real: took the app through Apple's complete review pipeline solo — screenshots at exact required resolutions, encryption documentation, EU Digital Services Act compliance, and an honest, carefully-reasoned App Privacy disclosure covering every data type the app actually collects.

Results

2,200+

real, curated places imported across 6+ cities

$0.026

avg. cost per place at scale

developer, start to App Store submission

Worldwide is submitted and awaiting Apple's review for public release on the App Store, with real place data spanning Melbourne, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and a growing set of secondary cities worldwide.

Solo project — designed, built, and shipped independently.