Previous Good Food apps had been built around the in-app purchases of cookbooks or collections of recipes. With the advent of the responsive web, this model no longer offered a differentiated app experience and a new approach was required.

The new BBC Good Food app was reimagined as a full extension of the website.  It provided full access to the 10,000 strong recipe collection, with deep integration into the shared My Good Food membership system through a custom API we helped design.  This shared login allows users to start saving and organising recipes on one device, and resume on another. 

Users can also rate recipes and submit their own recipes for consideration by the Good Food team.

A truly cross-platform approach was required. The new app needed to deliver a universal experience across all mobile platforms, both phone and tablet, within a tight budget and an even tighter timeframe – the pending release of iOS11 meant that the previous versions of the Good Food app would no longer work.

We selected the Xamarin mobile development framework – recently acquired by Microsoft - which allowed us to leverage centralised shared code across the iOS, Android and Windows platforms. Our teams could then focus on crafting the native user experience on each platform.

This latest project for BBC is our most extensive yet and we are extremely proud of the end result.