Kukd.com React Native App
Kukd.com is a cross-platform food delivery and restaurant discovery application built with Expo (React Native) for both iOS and Android devices. The app provides a complete food ordering experience, allowing users to browse restaurant menus, place delivery orders, book tables, manage their cart, process payments, and track orders in real time. A companion blog post discusses why React Native and Expo are an excellent choice for mobile projects.
Project Overview
The Kukd.com mobile app was developed to extend the existing Kukd.com web platform into a native mobile experience. The goal was to deliver a fast, fluid interface that felt native on both iOS and Android while sharing a single codebase. The app needed to integrate seamlessly with the existing backend infrastructure and data models already powering the Kukd.com website, ensuring consistency across platforms for both users and restaurant partners.
Key Features
- Restaurant browsing — discover nearby restaurants with location-based search and filtering
- Menu exploration — view detailed restaurant menus with item descriptions, pricing, and images
- Cart and ordering — add items to a basket, customise orders, and proceed through a streamlined checkout flow
- Table booking — reserve tables at participating restaurants directly within the app
- Secure payments — complete transactions using credit card payments processed through Checkout.com
- Order tracking — monitor order status from confirmation through to delivery
- User accounts — create and manage personal profiles, view order history, and save preferences
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App Features and technologies used
The entire application was written in TypeScript, providing type safety across the codebase and catching potential errors during development rather than at runtime. TypeScript’s strong typing was particularly valuable when working with the RESTful API responses and shared data models.
Expo was selected as the development platform for its streamlined build process, over-the-air update capabilities, and access to a rich set of pre-built native modules. Expo eliminated much of the native configuration complexity that typically accompanies React Native projects, allowing development to focus on features rather than build tooling.
The UI was styled using Styled-Components, which enabled component-scoped styling with full access to JavaScript logic within style definitions. This approach kept styles co-located with their components and made it straightforward to implement dynamic theming and responsive layouts.
State management was split across client and server concerns:
- Server state — Basket and cart data was managed with React Query, which handled caching, background refetching, and synchronisation with the backend. This ensured the cart always reflected the latest server-side state, even across network interruptions.
- Client state — User session data and location information were managed on the client side using the React Context API combined with the useReducer Hook, providing predictable state transitions without the overhead of an external state management library.
Payment processing was integrated with Checkout.com, providing a secure and PCI-compliant payment flow for credit card transactions within the app.
The backend API, built with Node.js and Express.js, features custom lean routes optimised specifically for the mobile app’s data requirements. These routes share compatible data models with the Kukd.com website, ensuring data consistency across the web and mobile platforms.
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