CASE STUDY
SOLO PROJECT · NATIVE iOS · 2025–2026 · DESIGN + BUILD
Pearl
A native iOS journal for people who take their oysters seriously.
OVERVIEW
Pearl is an iOS app for logging oysters: what you tried, where, how it was, and what your friends are eating. I designed it and built it in React Native.
I made it for my girlfriend and me. We love oysters but could never remember which ones we liked or where we tried them. We’d tried keeping track in the Notes app and it never stuck.
THE PROBLEM
01 — Tasting memory decays fast.
Kumamoto, Kusshi, Blue Point, Rockefeller. The vocabulary is genuinely hard and the differences are subtle. Without a log, even people who care forget what they liked.
02 — Restaurant apps answer the wrong question.
They’ll tell you a place serves oysters. They won’t tell you which varieties, from where, or whether they’re worth ordering.
03 — Recommendations are hard to hold onto.
The best suggestions come from friends who have actually eaten somewhere, but there’s nowhere good to keep them, so they’re gone by the time you’re sitting at the bar deciding what to order.
HOW I DESIGNED IT
Logging had to beat the Notes app on speed.
That was the bar. Photo, name, place, rating: four fields, one screen, under thirty seconds. Tasting notes and origin are optional and sit below the fold. If the fast path isn’t genuinely fast nobody builds a history, and without history there is no product.
The logging screen
Your own log comes first.
Your history is the home screen and your friends’ activity is one tab over. If the feed led, Pearl would turn into something you post for other people, and the thing that makes it useful a year from now is that your own record is complete.
Two themes because the use is split.
Dark for restaurants, which is where logging actually happens, and a warm light theme for browsing later. Both are designed, not one inverted.
Dark for the restaurant, light for later
Learning the names as you go.
Oyster names are the hardest part for someone new. Rather than putting a glossary somewhere nobody would open it, the app shows the variety and where it’s from while you’re logging, so you pick them up by using it.
WHAT CHANGED
It started as a private log. It became a social app.
The first scope was a journal and nothing else. Log what you ate, look it up later. That was the problem my girlfriend and I had, so that was what I built toward.
What changed it was thinking about where good recommendations actually come from. Nobody finds a new oyster bar in a directory. They find it because a friend ate there and told them about it, and then there’s nowhere to put that so it’s gone a week later. A private log fixes your memory. It doesn’t fix the part that made the log worth keeping.
So Pearl got a feed.
Your log first. The feed second.
WHAT I’D DO NEXT
Making the map the main way to browse
Right now the map is a tab inside your log, but where you ate something is usually how you remember it, so I think it should be the main way you look back. After that, an easier way to send someone a recommendation they’ll still be able to find later.