In 2016 I spent fifteen minutes redesigning Zomato

In 2016 I spent fifteen minutes redesigning Zomato’s Android app and accidentally wrote an essay about it 🍽👇 Back then Android was deep in Material Design 1.0, everyone was slowly killing the navigation drawer, and Zomato was still mostly “where should we eat tonight.” My self-imposed brief was simple: get users from app open to “I know where I’m eating” in under a minute. That led to a bottom navigation focused on core tasks, search as the primary action, and restaurant lists as the default view instead of maps. Typography and iconography were stripped back to support hierarchy, not decoration. Some bets aged well, like treating interaction cost and slow networks as first-class constraints, and framing location permissions as a value trade rather than a data grab. Others did not. The photo-heavy cards looked great in 2016 but hurt information density, and custom UI made life harder across random Android OEM skins. Looking back, it feels like a small snapshot of how consumer apps keep realigning with platforms, user expectations, and business goals. https://anandchowdhary.com/blog/2017/zomato