Project: Area Liquor Printer

June - August 2023

Liquor printer is a mobile app for the Area platform, which lets Liquor stores make orders, manage inventory, and update prices in their store using an associated label printer.

Download the App

This project was bootstrapped by an entrepreneur from Michgian, Jake Lewin. The idea was validated by extensive customer interviews performed by the CEO and an operations hire in Ann Arbor. I was brought on to launch the mobile app and get us to our first paying users.

Features

• Scan a barcode on a bottle to pull up information on the product and send a tag to be printed
• Scan the QR code on a price tag to reorder an item

Account management web app

My first challenge was to integrate Stripe and add account management for users. This was done by spinning up an EC2 to host a web app built with Vite, styled with TailwindCSS.

Stripe API integration

more info to come

Mobile app

The mobile app was build with React Native. The decision was made to not use Expo because we had to write a native module to enable communication between the app and our printer. The native module had to be written twice: once in Objective-C for iOS and once in Java for Android.

I was surprised by how much of a challenge it was to get the app listed on the App store and Google Play store. There were many small changes requested my Google and Apple, like adding a privacy policy to our landing page. This by itself isn't an issue, but we were totally at the mercy of the 3-5 day cycle time of the app store reviewers.

more info to come