Finding something to watch shouldn't take longer than actually watching it. That frustration is what led me to build ViewPick — a swipe-based movie discovery Progressive Web App that turns "what should we watch tonight" into a fast, almost game-like experience.
Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how it came together, and the technical decisions behind it.
The Idea
Most movie search experiences are just filtered lists — scroll, scroll, scroll. I wanted something more visceral: swipe right to save a movie to your watchlist, swipe left to skip it, Tinder-style. It's a small UX shift, but it makes discovery feel active instead of like homework.
Tech Stack
ViewPick is built with:
- Flutter Web for the frontend — one codebase, deployed as a installable PWA
- Supabase for the backend and watchlist persistence
- TMDB API (The Movie Database) as the source of truth for movie data, trailers, cast, and streaming availability
- Firebase Analytics to understand how people actually use the swipe interface
- PWA Manifest so the app installs like a native app on both mobile and desktop
Choosing Flutter Web meant I could ship one codebase across devices without maintaining separate mobile and web versions — a pattern I lean on across most of my projects to keep infrastructure lean.
Building the Swipe Engine
The core of ViewPick is the card stack. Each card represents a movie pulled from a dynamic TMDB recommendation engine, and the swipe gesture needed to feel instant and fluid — no lag between the gesture and the card leaving the screen. Getting this right meant tuning animation curves and making sure the next card was already prefetched and rendered before the user finished their swipe.
Smart Filtering, Not Just Random Movies
A pure random shuffle of movies gets old fast. So I added granular preference filters — people can exclude specific years, genres, or languages before they start swiping. This keeps the recommendation engine relevant instead of just throwing everything at the user.
Making It Feel Instant
One of the trickiest parts wasn't the swiping itself — it was making the rest of the app feel just as fast. I implemented:
- Optimistic UI updates — when you swipe right, the movie appears in your watchlist immediately, before the backend write even confirms
- Local database caching — so returning users get a near-instant load instead of waiting on a fresh API round-trip every time
Combined, these two things are what make ViewPick feel closer to a native app than a typical web app, despite running entirely in the browser.
Rounding Out the Details
Beyond the swipe mechanic, each movie card links out to full details — trailers, cast, plot summaries, and where to actually stream it. That last part matters: discovery is only half the problem, knowing where to watch it is the other half.
What's Next
ViewPick is live and I'm continuing to iterate on the recommendation engine and onboarding flow. If you want to try it, you can swipe through it yourself here: [viewpick.vercel.app](https://viewpick.vercel.app).
Building something similar for your product or business? I work on Flutter apps, PWAs, and custom web builds — [get in touch](https://adilrahman.cc).