Abattoir: A mobile app for Brussels' historic market site
A cross-platform Ionic React mobile app for Abattoir, the historic Anderlecht market and redevelopment site, backed by a Laravel API.
- Client
- Abattoir
- Role
- Full build (Ionic React app & Laravel API)
A cross-platform Ionic React mobile app for Abattoir, the historic Anderlecht market and redevelopment site, backed by a Laravel API.
Abattoir runs the historic market site in Anderlecht, Brussels: home to the Foodmet food hall, the Brocantemet flea market, a working meat-and-fish wholesale market, and an ongoing urban redevelopment. We built it a mobile app.
The challenge
A century-old market site with many moving parts (markets, wholesalers, news, events, redevelopment) needed a mobile presence that put all of it in visitors' pockets, on both iOS and Android, without maintaining two separate native builds.
What we built
Delivered at Cherry Pulp:
- A cross-platform mobile app built in Ionic React, one codebase for iOS and Android
- A Laravel API backend serving the app's content and data
- A single source of truth shared between the site's data and the app
My role
I built it end to end: the Ionic React mobile app and the Laravel API behind it.
The interesting part
Cross-platform mobile development with Ionic React means writing once and shipping to both iOS and Android, but the abstraction layer has to hold up across two runtimes with different rendering engines, input models, and store requirements. The interesting judgement call was building an API-first backend in Laravel that served as a genuine single source of truth, so the mobile layer never had to decide which platform's data was authoritative.
Outcome
Abattoir got one cross-platform app on a single codebase and API, rather than two native builds to keep in sync.