A mobile app for Wake County, NC that surfaces official health inspection scores for 3,800+ restaurants. Filter by grade, Google rating, or city — see violation history, score trends, and decide where to eat with confidence.
Wake County publishes restaurant health inspections, but they're buried in a clunky government portal that nobody checks before walking into a restaurant. I wanted a phone-friendly way to see a grade, recent violations, and decide where to eat — in two taps, not twenty.
I built WakeCheck with React Native and Expo, which let me ship a real iOS app in evenings without a full mobile team or the usual App Store certificate juggling. The county publishes inspection data as a messy public feed; I sync it nightly into a small database and clean it up server-side so the app stays fast and the user never sees the mess. If you're a non-technical founder, here's the takeaway: the heavy lifting wasn't the app itself — it was wrangling the real-world data behind it. Budget time for the boring stuff, not just the screens.
The county data is messy in every way real-world data tends to be: duplicate restaurant names, missing addresses, scores logged inconsistently across years. I spent more time cleaning and de-duping than I did writing app code. The lesson for any founder: your real problem is almost always the data, not the app.
Live on the App Store with 3,800+ Wake County restaurants searchable by grade, rating, or city. Took roughly six weekends from idea to ship. If you're a founder thinking "this seems simple," it usually is — but only after you wrestle the messy real-world data into shape.