Bander's Potato — restaurant app with games
A Flutter app that mixes loyalty, menu, and in-app mini-games.
- role
- Lead Mobile Developer
- duration
- 6 months
- team
- solo
- stack
- Flutter · Firebase · Google Maps · Bilingual
“a restaurant app people opened for fun, not just for takeout.”
The problem
Most restaurant apps are menu-plus-cart and nothing else. Retention craters after the first order. The client wanted an app people would open between meals.
The approach
Keep ordering sharp, but add loyalty as a first-class loop: points on every order, converting into coupon codes, nudged via push notifications. Then — the unusual part — add mini-games built as Flutter widgets that award bonus points. The games are short, branded, and genuinely fun. They’re the retention lever.
The stack
Flutter + Dart 3 · Firebase for auth, Firestore, and push · Google Maps for branch locator · easy_localization for bilingual UI · Blender-authored .glb 3D character models · offline-first with local cache + Firestore real-time sync.
Reflection
Loyalty loops die when they feel extractive. The games worked because the incentive was the play, not the points. Points were the excuse to come back.