Challenges Expanding my Android App.

[Remixt]

I've gotten to a pretty stale spot in the development of my app.

 

On one hand, the development is going really well, and I'm finally starting to add features like favorites and categories. 

On the other hand, the more features I add, the harder expanding in the future will become. 

 

I am currently stuck on one major issue though.

It's impossible to get access to any menu API's as a lowly student developer.

 

For months, I've been requesting access to a few different API's that provide a list of menu items. All of them have declined my application.

Some I've requested from:

OpenMenu

Locu

Food Genius

 

 

Why is this a problem?

 

If you take a look at the picture of my database, you can see that there are only 3 to 4 menu items for each restaurant. I can get a ton of data from yelp, in fact the name, address, phone number, rating, all of that jazz. However, I can't get the single most important part of my app, which is information about the specific food item. This means that I have to manually create entries for each restaurant I want my app to be compatible with.

 

If I ever want my app to be functional outside of Denton, I would need to do one of two things:

• Find a menu api that will allow me to add items algorithmic.
• Make the app user driven, which introduces a host of other issues. (such as false information, advertisements, ect..)

 

[vorticalbox]

if they have online menus you can parse the html or details else you're at a lose. Maybe try pulling data from just eat?

[Remixt]

1 hour ago, vorticalbox said:

if they have online menus you can parse the html or details else you're at a lose. Maybe try pulling data from just eat?

I'll take a look.

 

Yeah, I think there might be away to make user driven data work. I would need a huge user base pretty quick though. I could start growing the app with franchises and allow users to submit other items for approval.