// case_study · tericipe
We designed, built, and shipped a recipe app to Google Play.
Tericipe turns printed family recipes — index cards, church cookbooks, magazine clippings — into a digital recipe box people can search, cook from, and share. Hess WebTech designed it and took it from first commit to a public Google Play release in under three months, and we've kept shipping since.
< 3 months
First commit to Google Play
29
Screens & states, designed and built
85%
Minimum test coverage gate in CI
3
Production releases, first week of October
// the_problem
The recipes people actually cook aren't on a website.
They're on stained index cards and in spiral-bound church cookbooks. Retyping them is tedious, and most recipe apps are built around saving recipes from the web. Tericipe's job: get the box out of the kitchen drawer and onto a phone, without the retyping.
// what_we_built
One app, four jobs.
Capture
Point the camera at a printed recipe and it's typed up: title, ingredients, directions, time, servings. Multi-page recipes come in as one. Or type a recipe in by hand.
Organize
Collections, photos, and search by keyword, category, difficulty, or under 30 minutes.
Cook
Cooking Mode walks through one step at a time and keeps the screen awake.
Share
Send any recipe as a link. The person you send it to needs no app and no account.
// the_hard_parts
The parts that make an app trustworthy.
Screens are the visible part. These are the parts a business owner should ask any developer about — and the ones we spent the most care on.
01
Scanning that admits when it's unsure
Text recognition runs on the phone itself. Multi-page recipes are stitched into one. Instead of quietly saving a garbled recipe, the review screen flags lines it isn't sure about, and when a photo of an open cookbook catches two recipes at once, it asks for a retake. The reader is tuned against real photographed cookbook pages, not invented test data.
02
Payments the app can't fake
Tericipe Pro is a one-time Google Play purchase, not a subscription. Every purchase is verified by a server-side function — the only thing that can grant Pro. A modified copy of the app can't grant itself Pro, and the cloud photo storage behind Pro checks that grant independently.
03
Sharing without leaking
A share link publishes a stripped-down copy: the recipe and the sender's first name. No photos, no last name, no account details. "Stop sharing" kills the link for everyone, immediately. On Android with Tericipe installed, the same link opens right in the app, ready to save.
04
Privacy people can act on
Recipes are private to each account unless shared. Users can delete their account and everything in it from inside the app — no email, no waiting period. The privacy policy and terms were written from a review of what the code actually does, and they're re-reviewed whenever data handling changes.
// how_we_build
Built to be maintained, not just launched.
- TypeScript throughout, with automated checks on every change.
- Every release is version-tagged and checked on a real phone before it's promoted.
- Database security rules are tested on their own, separately from the app.
- Ongoing updates after launch: new features, fixes, and store listing work.
$ npm run test:coverage
✓ coverage gate: 85% minimum
$ npm run lint && npm run typecheck
✓ lint · typecheck passed
$ python3 scripts/verify-release.py
✓ v0.1.0-vc39 checked on a real phone
status: live on Google Play
// known_limits
Tericipe is Android-only today. Scanning reads printed and typed text — handwritten cards aren't supported yet, and recipes in table or column layouts may not scan cleanly. The store listing says so, and the app warns about handwriting before the first scan, because honest limits are part of shipping well.
// your_project
Accounts, payments, private data, an app store release, and support after launch.
That's the checklist behind most business apps, and Tericipe covers all of it. If you're weighing a customer app, an internal tool, or a product of your own, we can walk through what it would take — scope, stack, and what support looks like after launch.