iOS Team Lead at Asia’s premier cooking and lifestyle brand, building apps across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and iMessage.
DayDayCook’s name resonates with young men and women across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Videos are played in subways, airplanes, barber shops and more. The iOS app has been downloaded by millions and frequently appears on the App Store homepage and in other Apple promotional material. The app appeared in the introductory video to Apple’s 2017 WWDC event.
I joined in January 2016 as the 12th employee and first technical hire after the CTO, when the company raised its seed round from 500 Startups and M-Fund. I stayed through Series B, including a $5 million Series A+ from Alibaba. By December 2017, the company had grown to 175 employees. DayDayCook IPO’d on the NYSE American in 2023.
I was the only non-Chinese employee and conducted all work in Mandarin Chinese. As iOS Team Lead, I led the global launch in Summer 2016 (iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV apps featured on App Store front pages in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), independently built the iMessage app and coordinated with Apple to get it featured in three regions, and ran a 2017 Chinese New Year promotional campaign in partnership with the App Store.
App Store promotional video for the 2017 Chinese New Year campaign.
DayDayCook appeared in the introductory video to Apple’s 2017 WWDC event.
iPhone + iPad App
The iPhone/iPad universal application is the core of the DayDayCook iOS experience. As team lead, I led development efforts on the app’s custom video player, recipe page, ecommerce homepage, and many other features.
The video player supports picture-in-picture so users can keep watching while scrolling through recipes, quick sharing, recipe step overlays, synchronized recipe step alert popovers, a shortcut button to enter the comments section, and a fully customized user interface. The recipe page includes ingredients, cooking steps, recommended recipes, tips, and comments. The app also hosts flash sales and extended sales sections with countdown timers, a unique profile page with custom UI components, and interactive features like photo competitions and surveys.
Cooking Course Page (Paid Content)
Custom Video Player w/ cooking steps overlaid
Custom Video Player w/ buttons to open cooking steps or view comments
Recipe Page
Recipe Ingredients & Steps
Ingredient Details
Recommended Recipes & User Comments
Ecommerce Store
Ecommerce Store w/ Articles & Products
Ecommerce Store w/ Sold Out Item
User Profile Page
User Voting Feature
User Comments with Image Gallery
iMessage App
The iMessage app and sticker app launched alongside iOS 10 with App Store featuring in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. I created both applications independently in the week before iOS 10’s release.
The app supports recipe sharing via iMessage, a sticker application with unlockable rewards for the 2017 Chinese New Year promotion, keyword and extended search functionality, and shopping list sharing. Shared recipes launch the main DayDayCook app directly to the specific recipe video. The instability of the beta iOS 10 versions and the requirements for split screen support in both landscape and portrait orientations created difficulties, but we delivered a highly performant application.
iMessage App on Hong Kong App Store front page
iMessage App on Mainland China App Store front page
Stickers launch on App Store
Recipe Search in iMessage w/ Filters
Apple TV App
As part of the global launch in 2016, I developed the Apple TV app independently using a combination of Objective-C and JavaScript. The app was featured on the front page of three App Stores—China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
The app opens to the full library of over 3,000 DayDayCook recipes, sorted by category. It supports full text search, user login including via Facebook, and synchronizes each user’s favorite recipes with the iPhone and iPad apps. Each recipe has a details page with video, cooking steps, ingredients, and a favorite button. All recipe videos can be played full screen on the Apple TV.
App Store Featured
Recipe Library
Recipe Details Page
Recipe Details
Video Playback
Apple Watch App
The Apple Watch app was my first major independent project at DayDayCook. I spent one month collaborating with Apple’s App Store team to build an application featuring DayDayCook recipes optimized for the smartwatch display.
The app opens to a rotating carousel of the five most recently published recipes. Users can swipe right to access favorite recipes saved through the main application. The primary challenges involved managing image sizing within the watch’s undocumented memory constraints and designing creative workarounds for limited UI elements like scrollviews and pull-to-load-more functionality.
Home / Recipe View
Recipe Favorited
Recipe Detail Page w/ Deep Link to iOS App Video Player
Ingredient List
Recipe Steps
Recipe Steps w/ Images