An iOS app that helps you decide what to eat — designed, written, built and shipped to the App Store single-handed, by a designer who is not an engineer.
Every evening, in every household, the same negotiation: what should we eat? The internet answers it with abundance — ten thousand recipes, infinitely scrollable, none of them chosen. Abundance is the disease, not the cure.
Khao takes the opposite position. It shows one dish. If it is wrong, you swipe; if it is right, you cook it. It does not decide for you — it removes enough of the field that deciding becomes possible again.
A recommendation is only as good as the rules it refuses to break.
An Indian food app cannot treat diet as a preference. Jain, vegan, vegetarian, egg, allergy, a fasting day, Sawan Somwar, a household where one person eats meat and another has not since birth — these are not filters to be weighed and traded off. They are absolutes. A single wrong suggestion destroys trust permanently.
The engine came first: a ranking model that scores every dish against diet, allergies, time, hunger, mood, spice, richness, budget and calories — with the dietary rules implemented as a hard gate that runs before scoring, never as a weight inside it.
The catalogue was hand-authored and audited rather than scraped. One sweep found thirty-two contradictions — dishes flagged vegan while declaring dairy, vegetarian while listing egg — each corrected on the principle that the ingredient list always overrules the label.
The interface went through three full redesigns and twenty builds. Apple rejected it three times. Each rejection was read as a design note rather than an obstacle.
Subtraction as a feature.
One card. One dish. A swipe to dismiss, a tap to cook. Behind that restraint sits a household model that reconciles several people's non-negotiables at once, a calendar that knows which days are restricted, and a palate model that quietly stops offering what you keep refusing.
Everything runs on the device. There is no account to create and no server holding anyone's dietary or religious information — a decision made on principle before it was a feature.
Khao is live on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, in English and Hindi. It was designed, engineered, tested, submitted and shipped by one person — evidence for the argument this studio keeps making: that taste and logic are a single faculty, and that a designer who understands a system deeply enough can build it.
Ye khao. — one dish at a time, and you decide.