I’ve been building a vegan places directory (shared in this post) and enough people asked for an app that it’s finally live on iOS and Android. It’s a small independent project run by 2 people. If you’ve used HappyCow it lives in that world, but the focus is a bit different:
- Vegan-oriented, not vegetarian. A place with no vegan options doesn’t get listed, and 100% vegan spots are flagged separately from mostly-vegan, vegan-friendly, and “only 1-2 vegan options” - so you know before you go.
- Free, no ads, nobody can pay to rank higher. Businesses can claim and manage their own page for free.
- Open and community-correctable: much of the data is OpenStreetMap + other open sources, so if a spot’s missing you can add it, and if something’s mislabelled or mis-categorised you can help me fix it from its page in one tap.
- It’s more than a map - there are free vegan tools in there too (barcode scanner, menu/ingredients scanner, and more).
Honest about the state: it’s still growing, some cities are thin, and since a lot of the data comes from OSM/open sources the quality isn’t perfect yet.
Looking forward to your feedback and criticism - be brutal.
That’s great to see! HappyCow is already a decent option, but something vegan oriented is of course better. Do you plan to also release your app on F-Droid or similar open source stores?
Cheers for the work!
I have a plan for a dedicated F-Droid version of the app. And hope to launch it during the summer still (hope the new google approach to apps will fail as well). It’s a little more tricky for me personally as this is my first-ever production-grade mobile app, so it takes some time to figure out the details. For example, push notifications will not work, for better or worse and I’d like people to get notifications when there is a new vegan spot in their city + I use Expo (this felt like the best path initially) which will not work well for F-droid builds.
So it will take some time - but I will open source it and move to F-Droid and hopefully other catalogs as well.
That’s great to hear that an f-droid version is coming! Would you be open to implementing UnifiedPush for those builds?
For an app like this, not having notifications wouldn’t be the end of the world for me, but the more apps that support alternatives to Google Firebase, the better.
I’ll definitely consider this. It gets harder to maintain, the more users are joining, so I need to reconsider some of the aprooval flows, review flows etc. to make sure data-quality is at least stable and hopefully improving first. But UnifiedPush will indeed land in the backlog right below the basic F-Droid version