Menu, please! blog 
Hi everyone!
This week we took a big step toward making Menu, please! a LOT more stable for everyone. When we started building the app, our main goal was to get it into your hands as fast as possible. That meant choosing speed over stability and scalability.
Now that we’re approaching 500 active users and seeing how Menu, please! is used in the wild, we decided to shift focus:
👉 No new features this week — instead, resilience and reliability.
✨ New Features & Fixes
🔁 Backend, baby!
All menu processing now happens server-side. This means fewer bugs, faster performance, and smoother recovery from interruptions. In addition, on average, we are saving 5 seconds of translating time!
🧟♂️ Hunting zombies
After the migration, we discovered that some users were still running outdated Menu, please! frontend zombie code due to a misconfigured PWA component and caching. My bad! This led to mysterious errors and broken translations. We’ve reached out to affected users and deployed a fix. Hopefully, this one stays dead.
📱 Saving that expensive data
Images are now compressed directly on your phone before upload, using the WEBP format. That means:
- Faster uploads
- Smaller file sizes
- Less data used — perfect for travel!
🐞 Open Issues
🌐 Network errors for a few users
A small group of users is seeing network errors during menu translation. We’re actively working with them to debug and solve the issue.
🛠️ What’s Next?
📱 Mobile apps
We’re working on bringing Menu, please! to iOS and Android as standalone apps! With 70%+ of our users on iOS, that’s our first priority — followed by Android.
This is our first time packaging a PWA as a mobile app, so it’s hard to estimate how long it’ll take. But we’re excited to bring Menu, please! to your home screens.
💌 Weekly Thank You
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Huge thank you to everyone who jumped on a call to help us troubleshoot bugs. Seeing issues live — across different phones, networks, and countries — makes a massive difference.
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We’ve received some amazing feedback lately. Knowing that a tiny project born from frustration in a Taipei night market is now helping people order food in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China is surreal. ❤️
Here are some of the comments that made our week:
“Menu, please! is excellent It reads the menu, converts it into an easy to read menu format, with Japanese pronunciation and you can specify how much of everything you need and it’ll repeat it back in Japanese to the server. Can’t recommend it enough” - r/DexterousChunk
“Finde die Idee mega gut! Hab die letzten drei Monate in Japan verbracht und da hätte es mir einiges an nervigem Google-Nonsens erspart.” - u/lydia-morphem
Have a great weekend and 慢慢吃！
– Krists & Chris