The app becomes real

With price already settled according to who’s asking, it was time to bring Nada Menos to where people actually shop: their phone, not their laptop. The first step was making it installable like any other app — with its own icon, drawn from the quipu mark itself, not a borrowed generic one — and from there moving to a native version that runs on Android the same as any app downloaded from a store.

The trickiest part of this stretch was something the web takes for granted and an app doesn’t: signing in with your Google account. The whole round trip — leaving the app, authenticating, coming back exactly where you were — had to work without stranding you in someone else’s browser or losing your session along the way. I tested it end to end on a real phone, not an emulator, because that’s the only place a detail like this actually gets confirmed.

With that working, I added something that didn’t make sense before there was an app: a barcode scanner. Point the camera at a product on the shelf and it tells you whether it’s worth buying there or if a better price is waiting at another store — the same question the comparator already answers, but right at the moment you need it, standing in front of the shelf.

A few weeks ago, this was a list on a laptop. Today it’s an app that recognizes products, watches your wallet based on how you pay, and answers through the camera. I’ll keep telling the story here as it continues.