On Island

The problem

Generic directories (Yelp, Google) aren't tuned to the islands. A cruise visitor in port for the day, a snowbird who lives there half the year, a villa renter for a week, and a year-round local all want different things from the same map — and they care about signals the big platforms ignore: how many cruise passengers are ashore, what the beach conditions actually look like, when the ferry leaves, what's still open after 8pm in the off-season.

The solution

Native iOS and Android apps and a web app, all on one Supabase backend, that recognize who you are — traveler, local, villa owner or snowbird — and reorder the home screen, category grid and emergency strip to match. A daily Island Brief puts cruise crowds, weather, tides and beach conditions on the front page. Businesses sign up and pay for their own listings, and admins approve each one before it goes live.

Highlights

Native iOS (SwiftUI) and Android (Kotlin / Jetpack Compose) apps in the App Store and Google Play, alongside the web app — one backend for all three
Daily Island Brief — cruise passengers ashore hour by hour, weather, tides, beach conditions, UV, and NOAA storm alerts
Getting Around — today's flights, ferries and car barges, taxi rates and buses
Full English and Spanish, with AI translation of listing content that re-translates when the source changes
Search inside restaurant menus — PDF text layer first, Google Vision OCR fallback, indexed in Postgres
PostGIS-backed map of beaches, pools, ATMs and every listed business
Self-serve business listings with annual billing through Braintree, admin approval before going live, and review notifications for owners
Three auth realms (user / business / admin) with the role injected into the JWT via a custom Supabase access-token hook — row-level security is the primary permission layer

Stack

Next.jsSwiftUIKotlinPostgreSQLSupabase

Integrations

BraintreeMapboxGoogle MapsGoogle Cloud VisionClaudeResend

What it actually looks like.

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