Single Fin is the stretch of Tuscan coast where your dog is not merely put up with, it is a guest. The app I built works as the front desk: it hands out the parasols, takes the order at the bar, collects the payment. It has been live since 2020, opening and closing every season alongside the beach club, on the App Store and on Google Play.
The problem
People who bring a dog to the beach watch the sky, not the calendar. They make up their mind at eight in the morning and ring at half past, when there is still nobody at the desk because the whole team is out on the sand opening parasols. A call nobody picks up is a spot that stays empty all day.
The parasol map lived on a sheet of paper: rows, numbers, names written down and crossed out. That works as long as there is one sheet in the hands of one person. On a busy day it becomes two sheets and two people, and sooner or later a family gets walked to a parasol that already belongs to somebody else.
Ordering meant getting up, queueing and leaving the dog behind at the sunbed. Orders were shouted across the counter and held in someone's head: the person waiting loses patience, the person serving gets it wrong, and by the end of the day fewer things have been ordered than could have been.
The answer
Not a shop window with a phone number at the bottom of the page: the app takes on the three jobs that cost the club the most time, and does them without anyone having to stop and answer.
1
You see the plan of the beach with the rows, the free spots and the ones already taken, you pick yours and confirm. From that moment it shows as taken for everyone else: booking the same parasol twice is no longer a slip that can happen, it is something the system will not allow.
2
The bar menu sits inside the app. The order reaches the counter in writing, with the parasol number attached: nobody shouts it, nobody has to remember it, and nobody has to leave the dog on its own to go and place it.
3
There are two routes, and the guest picks: pay online at the moment of booking, or book and settle within 24 hours of the booked date. Either way the club knows the evening before which parasols are sold and who is genuinely turning up, and nobody turns up hunting for cash.
Beach map→ Parasol picked→ Paid online→ Order from the sunbed→ Brought to the spot
Under the hood
A beach club cannot afford two separate projects, one for iPhone and one for Android, with two teams and two schedules. Here there is a single project.
The app is written once in Angular with Ionic. Capacitor wraps it as a native application for iOS and for Android: two stores, two packages to ship, a single codebase to maintain. That is why a fix made today reaches both phones in the same release.
Angular · Ionic · Capacitor
The plan is not a picture uploaded once and forgotten: the rows, the parasols, the numbers and the state of every spot are data. Changing the layout at the start of the season means editing data, not redrawing the app and republishing it to the stores while two reviews run.
Map · Parasol status
Stripe handles the money: card details never touch the club's own systems and I do not keep them either. It is the same plumbing I use in booking platforms and back office systems, where the money has to land without argument and the receipts have to add up.
Stripe · Online payments
From the admin area the season is opened and closed, prices are updated and the day can be read at a glance: who booked, where, what they ordered. It is the part the client uses every single day, so it is the part I designed to work standing up, in the sun, one handed.
Back office · Season management
What changed
The honest way to judge an app like this one is not downloads: it is how many things have stopped passing through somebody's hands. The paper parasol map is gone, and the whole class of mistakes it produced went with it. Orders are not shouted: they arrive at the counter in writing, with the number of the spot on them. The takings are not counted at closing time: they came in before the guest set foot on the sand.
Parasol map/ Bookings/ Bar orders/ Payments/ Opening the season
The other verifiable fact is how long it has lasted. Since 2020 the app has opened and closed every season, and every season brings operating system updates, fresh rules from Apple and Google and fresh requests from the owner. Staying published on the stores for years is not luck: it is maintenance done before the season starts, while the club is still shut and a problem costs a phone call rather than a trading day.
You will find the same setup in the Sunset Beach Club case study, another beach club living the same seasonal life, and on the page where I explain how I work on mobile apps for iOS and Android, from the first screen through to the store review.
What this means for you
Parasols, sunbeds, cabins, restaurant: the names change, the problem does not. You need a map that tells the truth at every moment, a way to book that does not go through the telephone and a payment that arrives before the guest does. If the season has already started, you ship what is needed now and the rest lands in the next release.
Parasols · Orders · Payments
A business that opens in May and shuts in September cannot afford software that has to be set up from scratch every spring. The season is opened from a panel, prices change without touching the code, and I take care of publishing to the stores myself: developer accounts, listings, screenshots and the Apple and Google reviews.
Seasonality · App Store · Google Play