Barq

Barq set out to give neighborhood cafés, bakeries, florists and grocers in Ras Al Khaimah a pickup-first way to take orders. Its pitch to stores is short: no delivery riders, no 30% commission, no tablet farm.

That meant one product across the customer's phone, the store's dashboard and the counter hardware, in English and Arabic, with exact VAT-inclusive pricing, loyalty per store and one hook people remember: a sticker with their own message, printed at the counter.

I designed Barq as one TypeScript monorepo around a single API: Hono and Prisma on PostgreSQL, with 126 REST endpoints and a WebSocket channel for live orders that checks access on every subscription. On it, the Admix Lab team and I built the Expo customer app, an Expo store dashboard for web, iPad and phone, the Android POS and a Next.js 16 website with the admin console, then checked them screen by screen in light, dark and Arabic over two recorded design-review passes.

Money is stored as integer fils with VAT-inclusive prices, and the pricing rules live in one shared package. The server re-prices every order when it is placed and rejects a total that no longer matches. Store access comes from the caller's membership or the POS device token, never from the request body, and API tests cover that isolation. Online payment runs on Ziina's hosted checkout, with HMAC-verified webhooks. The API generates and checks its own sign-in codes and sends them by SMS through Twilio's Programmable Messaging API, with a console provider for development.

Stickers are rendered on the server as black-and-white images sized to the store's label roll. Arabic receipts are rendered on the server too, while English ones print as text, all through a Kotlin module with 11 native functions that wraps the Sunmi printer SDK. Claude drafts descriptions, translations and price suggestions into a review queue, so nothing publishes without the store's approval.

v1 is complete and pre-launch: built between 7 and 16 September 2026, not yet deployed or listed on the App Store or Google Play.

In the v1 build, customers browse, customize, add a sticker, pay online or at pickup, use curbside and earn points and stamps. Stores run orders, menus, promotions and reports from the web or a phone. Counter staff accept, print and hand over orders on the POS, and admins approve stores and manage sticker themes and campaigns.

The POS Android APK is built. Next on the roadmap is a test pass on a physical Sunmi V3 to calibrate label gaps, print density and Arabic receipt width.