Westender is Glasgow’s West End guide. Restaurants, shops, offers on right now. We built it for Westender Magazine over a decade ago and have kept it running on both stores ever since.
Apps age. Apple and Google keep raising the bar on target SDKs, background location, notifications and design language, and the store rules move every year. We stay in step so the magazine’s team doesn’t have to think about it.
The current build is SwiftUI on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android. Each platform behaves like it belongs there: Apple’s map on iOS, OpenStreetMap on Android (no Google Maps bill), a Westender-green pin for “you are here”, and native push. Same content, same identity.
Alongside the app we added a monthly audit that compares the venue list against Google Places, flags places that have quietly closed or been renamed, and posts the suggestions to a WordPress admin page. One click removes a closed venue, or turns a new one into a prefilled draft. It saves the magazine an afternoon a month of chasing what is still open.
Both apps ship through our own release scripts. One command builds, signs, and uploads to TestFlight or Google Play, and for iOS a small App Store Connect script kicks the review off without leaving the terminal.
More of our work: Apps & Systems
