Mobile · 2026
Balive
- Year
- 2026
- Scope
- Mobile · Academic
- Role
- Solo iOS Developer
- Team
- Solo
- Stack
- Swift, SwiftUI, Supabase, Supabase
- Status
- Concept
Boarding house search in Bali with a swipe-card interaction.
A boarding house finder for Bali that borrows the swipe-card interaction from dating apps. Built for Challenge Zero at the Apple Developer Academy @BINUS, then extended beyond the two screens the brief required.
Balive started as Challenge Zero at the Apple Developer Academy @BINUS, where the brief was to build an app around a problem you had personally run into. The required scope was two screens. After meeting that, the app was extended into a fuller browsing experience.
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The interaction model is deliberately borrowed from dating apps: listings arrive one card at a time and are dismissed with a swipe, which makes scanning a long list of boarding houses far faster than reading a vertical feed. Tapping a card opens a detail view for that place.
The listings were gathered by hand rather than pulled from a service, no usable dataset covers boarding houses around the academy, so the places in the app came from surveying the area in person. Of the build itself, the swipe-card mechanic took the most work.
Brief
Problem
Finding a decent boarding house in Bali is difficult, especially for someone arriving for the first time. Searching before the academy started mostly surfaced places that were expensive, far from campus, or both.
Solution
A swipe-card browsing flow that makes scanning many listings quick, backed by a detail view for each place. The intended audience is the next Apple Developer Academy @BINUS cohort, who will face the same search.
My role
- 01
Designed and built the entire app end to end
- 02
Defined the swipe-card browsing model as the core interaction
Features
- 01
Swipe-card browsing of boarding house listings
- 02
Home screen listing available places
- 03
Detail screen for each boarding house
Architecture
- Front end
- Swift, SwiftUI
- Data
- Supabase
- Infrastructure
- Supabase
Challenges
- 01
Problem
A boarding-house finder needs listings, and no usable dataset existed for the area around the academy in Bali.
Solution
Collected the listings by hand, surveying boarding houses around the academy in person and entering them into the app.
Lessons
- 01
Building for a problem you have yourself gives you the dataset: the listings came from walking the area around the academy rather than from an API.
- 02
The brief only asked for two screens. Carrying it past that was a choice, and the swipe-card mechanic was where most of the effort went.