Developer Builds NHS-Adjacent Nutrition App That Could Never Be Installed Due to Tiny Icon Bug
A solo developer spent three days testing a proof-of-concept nutrition logging app on real devices, designed as a workaround tool rather than an official NHS product. The app used barcode scanning tied to the Nutritics database, deliberately avoiding calorie estimates to prevent logging errors for users. Despite all tests appearing to pass, the app could never actually be installed as a Progressive Web App due to two icon files that were only 68 bytes each, despite the manifest declaring full-size icons. Four separate export bugs were also discovered exclusively through real-device testing, two of which produced no error messages whatsoever. The project highlights how silent failures — from broken icons to no-op export functions — can go undetected without hands-on physical device testing.
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