Tangeloo: Building a Community-First App to Share and Swap Homegrown Produce

Tangeloo is a mobile app that helps home gardeners trade or share surplus produce with neighbors. WebAppDev brought the idea to life in just three months, designing and developing a friendly, location-based platform that fosters connection, reduces waste, and builds community.

  • Agriculture
  • Mobile App
  • Design & Dev
Client Overview
Client Name: Tangeloo
Industry: Community Food / Agriculture Tech
Timeline & Budget: 3 months
Budget:Seed-stage (lean & focused on MVP)

Tangeloo began with a simple but powerful idea: if someone’s backyard lemon tree is bursting with fruit, why not let neighbors benefit too?

The founders noticed how often fresh produce went to waste and how much potential there was in connecting local growers with their community. Whether someone had excess tomatoes, avocados, or herbs, they wanted to create a space where users could easily list, browse, and trade homegrown goods through a friendly mobile app.

Their goal was less about profit and more about cultivating connection, reducing waste, and creating a more sustainable local food culture.

Challenge
Underutilized Audience Potential

While the mission was clear, the execution needed help. Tangeloo came to WebAppDev with a sketch of their idea, but no technical roadmap. They needed to:

  • Translate their community-driven concept into real user flows
  • Design an interface that felt welcoming and trustworthy
  • Enable location-based listings with real-time browsing and filtering
  • Offer secure, lightweight in-app messaging
  • Build an admin portal for backend control (user reports, listing moderation, etc.)
  • Launch quickly to test their idea with a pilot community before seeking further investment

The biggest challenge was doing it all within a tight startup budget and timeline, without sacrificing usability or delight.

UI/UX Design Process
Wireframing & User Flow Mapping

We started by digging into the experience from a gardener’s point of view:

  • What would make it easy to post a listing?
  • How do we reduce hesitation to trade with someone new?
  • What features feel essential vs. overkill for an MVP?

From this, we mapped out core screens, onboarding, posting, searching nearby listings, chatting, and built low-fidelity wireframes to align with the founding team.

Clickable Prototypes

These early screens were transformed into interactive prototypes that we used to test flows and get quick feedback from the client and a few early testers. The clickable prototype helped shape Tangeloo’s user journey before writing a single line of code.

Visual Design & Aesthetics

We created a soft, nature-inspired design system:

  • Colors: Muted greens and earth tones for warmth and trust.
  • Typography: Rounded sans-serif fonts for friendliness and readability.
  • Illustrations: Subtle custom icons and produce illustrations with added personality.
  • Modular UI Components: Buttons, cards, filters, and headers designed to stay consistent and scale easily with future features.

The end result felt like what you’d expect from a friendly, neighborhood gardening tool, not a cold, impersonal marketplace.

Core Features & Development

Users could post what they were offering, lemons, kale, mint, you name it, and define their preferred exchange radius so nearby neighbors could discover them.

A listing form made it easy to snap a photo, write a short description, set a quantity, and mark availability.

The app allowed users to browse produce near them, sort listings by freshness or category (fruits, herbs, vegetables), and filter by distance or time posted.

Lightweight chat allowed users to coordinate pickups or drop-offs securely. The experience was simple and didn’t require exchanging personal contact info.

Each gardener had a basic profile that listed their past activity and allowed simple thumbs-up feedback after trades, building trust in the community without overcomplicating the UX.

We also built a web-based admin portal for the Tangeloo team. They could manage user activity, flagged or expired listings, community reports, support requests, and content moderation tools.

Data privacy was a core consideration. All chat messages were encrypted, and user location data was only shared approximately (never exact addresses), to protect trust and comfort.

Our Results
500+

Community gardeners onboarded in the pilot week.

4.8/5

User feedback rating.

We came in with a dream and a rough sketch, and they helped us turn it into something real, usable, and deeply aligned with our values. They asked the right questions, challenged us when needed, and brought a level of thoughtfulness and care that went far beyond code. The end result is a little ecosystem of neighbors connecting over homegrown food, and that means everything to us.

Co-Founder, Tangeloo.

Final Thoughts

Tangeloo is a tool to build relationships, share abundance, and reduce waste in a way that feels real and local. For us at WebAppDev, it was a chance to build something that helps people feel more connected to their neighbors, their gardens, and their values. It reminded us that apps don’t always have to scale fast to be meaningful; they just need to solve real problems with empathy and clarity.

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