How I Built Avo Balance — An AI-Powered Meal Plan Organizer with Flutter

#flutter #ai #mobiledev #dart

Hi, I'm Bayajit Islam — a software developer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
I build cross-platform mobile apps using Flutter & Dart, and backend APIs
with FastAPI & Python.

Today I want to share how I built Avo Balance — an AI-powered meal plan
organizer now live on Google Play Store.

The Problem

Most people have a meal plan. But following it daily is the hard part.

You forget what to eat. You miss meals. You don't know what to buy at
the grocery store. Your plan just sits there — unused.

That's exactly what Avo Balance tries to fix.

What is Avo Balance?

Simple idea — upload your meal plan, and let the app do the rest.

Avo Balance reads your plan using AI, breaks it into a clean daily
schedule, reminds you when to eat, and even generates your grocery
list automatically.

No more forgetting. No more guessing. Just follow the plan.

📱 Download on Google Play

Why Flutter?

I'm a Flutter developer — so Flutter was the natural choice.

But beyond that, Flutter genuinely made sense for this project.
One codebase. iOS and Android. Same experience on both platforms.
And the UI possibilities with Flutter are hard to match.

How It Works

Step 1 — Upload your meal plan
Take a photo or upload a document of your diet plan.
AI reads it and extracts your meals automatically.

Step 2 — Get your daily schedule
Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks — all organized
into a clean daily view.

Step 3 — Follow reminders
The app reminds you when it's time to eat so you
never miss a meal.

Step 4 — Track your progress
Mark meals as eaten or skipped. See your calorie
overview for the day.

Step 5 — Shop smarter
Avo Balance generates a grocery list based on your
meal plan automatically.

Challenges I Faced

The AI part was harder than I expected

Getting AI to correctly read different types of meal plans
was genuinely challenging. People upload all kinds of things —
handwritten notes, PDF documents, photos of printed plans.
Making the extraction reliable took a lot of iteration.

Notifications are never as simple as they look

I thought notifications would take a day. It took much longer.
Android has strict battery optimization that blocks notifications.
Testing on real devices revealed problems the emulator never showed.

Building for both free and paid users

Deciding what features to put behind a subscription and how to
handle billing cleanly across Android and iOS was a learning curve.
But once it clicked, it felt very rewarding.

What I Learned

Honestly, the biggest lesson wasn't technical.

It was this — ship early, improve later.

I spent too long trying to make everything perfect before releasing.
The moment I published to the Play Store and real users started
downloading it, the feedback I got was worth more than weeks of
solo testing.

Also — always test on a real device. Always.