The Good Food app, launched in November 2024, offers thousands of expert recipes, restaurant reviews, and culinary advice to nearly 6,000 active users. I had the privilege of working with an exceptionally talented, multidisciplinary team to bring this beloved Australian brand’s app to life within a year.

As part of a four-person iOS engineering team, I not only developed several key features but also took on a tech lead role for multiple initiatives. This involved gathering requirements, liaising with stakeholders across various departments, and serving as the primary point of contact for other engineers.

Overview

• I served as the tech lead for key initiatives — custom UX components, animations, rich content rendering, data and analytics, onboarding and authentication

• Liaised and communicated with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including editors, product owners, designers, and directors

• A key initiative I led was transitioning from RxSwift, previously used across Nine, to Combine

• I averaged 6 PR reviews per sprint for 2 years with positive feedback from engineers and my EM

• Worked with Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, Combine, CoreData, StoreKit, MapKit, and CoreLocation

• Third party integrations included Firebase, Qualtrics, Google Places, Piano and Snowplow analytics

• Exposure to CI tools Fastlane and Bitrise as needed during sprints

I’ll now dive into some of my key engineering contributions to the Good Food app.

World class user experience

• This was the first app at Nine Entertainment built primarily with SwiftUI

• Integrated UIKit, SwiftUI, and Lottie animations to craft a premium and engaging experience

• Developed bespoke interface components and experiences to align with Good Food’s brand and create an immersive experience

• Pioneered the adoption of Combine at Nine, transitioning from RxSwift

• Leveraged Combine, async/await, Dispatch Queues, and lazy SwiftUI views for a smooth, responsive experience

• Integrated haptic feedback to enhance key interactions, creating a more tactile user experience

• Integrated Qualtrics, Firebase, and Snowplow to collect insights and continuously refine features

Authentication and paywall

• Developed the email login, account creation and forgot password features by communicating with a REST API

• Implemented Sign in with Google using GoogleSignInSDK that spoke to a GCP app that I had to configure

• Co-developed the paywall using the Piano framework, enabling remote updates without additional engineering effort

• Integrated event observation in Piano’s WebView to trigger the payment flow via StoreKit 2

Location and map experience

We expected the map feature to be a hit, and it has since become the most loved and widely used feature on GoodFood. To ensure a seamless experience that keeps users coming back, it had to be engineered with with care.

• CoreLocation was utilized to retrieve the user's location to deliver location-specific content

• Engineered a robust solution to fetch venues via a GraphQL API and render them as MapKit annotations

• A key engineering challenge was creating the bounding box at the optimal zoom level, adjusting for different scenarios based on the venue data

• Integrated the Google Places SDK to enrich venue data with additional details

Rendering rich content

• HTML content was tokenized and converted to Markdown which is supported by SwiftUI

• Leveraged AsyncImage to asynchronously load images, ensuring smooth scrolling without blocking the UI

• Rich text was supported with a wide range of fonts, colors, and styles for enhanced flexibility

• Links were treated to render correctly and detect taps, triggering actions based on a whitelisting policy

• Social media embeds (Instagram, TikTok) were rendered using WKWebView, with data fetched via platform-specific APIs

Search and filter

GoodFood offers thousands of expert recipes, restaurant reviews, and culinary tips, and we wanted to empower users to easily find the content they're looking for.

• The SearchResultsController served as the interface to a GraphQL search API, powering the search experience

• A dynamic filter experience, driven by Firebase Remote Config, allowed for real-time filter updates without app releases

• Additionally, users had access to powerful client-side sorting options for greater control over their results

Accessibility

• The app was built to support light and dark mode

• Dynamic text resizing was was enabled, adapting to the user's device settings for better readability

• The app also enabled screen reader support for a few interface components

Head over to the app store to get a taste of the Good Food app for iOS.

If you think I’d be a great fit for your project, please drop me a line at shawnfrank.work@gmail.com