Feature reference · For food lovers

Everything Munchl does, in detail.

The complete reference, grouped into 15 areas. Each card says what a feature does and, where it helps, how it works underneath.

01 / Feed and discovery

Feed and discovery

Two ways to browse: Global is a social feed of posts, Local is a deck of place cards around you. Both are built for the moment between "I'm hungry" and "let's go".

Global: Discover

Posts from people and places. Anything you haven't seen comes first, then posts are ordered by freshness, how close the tagged place is to you, whether you follow the author, and engagement (likes and comments), with a little randomness so the feed never feels frozen.

Seen posts are remembered on your device, not on a server.

Global: Following

One card per account you follow, showing their latest post, unseen accounts first. Discover leaves out people you follow so you never see the same post twice.

Local

Swipeable place cards for wherever you are right now, at home or travelling. Each card shows photos and videos, live open or closed status, what the kitchen is serving, price level and distance. Tap Local again to snap back to your live location and the first card.

Paints the nearest 3 km first, then fills out to 60 km.

Promoted posts are labelled

Places can promote their events and deals. Those show as clearly marked cards with a call to action, never ranked among normal posts and never more than one after every five posts. Events that have ended disappear.

Verified check-ins

A post that tags a place counts as a real visit only if your phone was actually there (or the photo's own location matches). Unconfirmed posts stay on the author's profile but are left out of other people's Discover, which keeps fake hype off the feed.

Within 100 m for 3 min in the last 30 days, photo GPS within 200 m, posted within 150 m, or a completed order there.

Filters and search

Filter by place type (restaurant, bar, café, nightlife and more), cuisine, price and rating. Global's search finds posts by caption, title or tagged place; Local's search finds places by name across the whole database.

02 / Posting

Posting

A post is the base unit of Munchl: photos or videos, tied to a place, optionally carrying the dishes you had or the ingredients you used.

Galleries

Up to 10 photos and videos in any mix per post. Swipe sideways inside a post, up and down between posts.

Long videos

Videos up to 10 minutes. Large files upload in full; if they're ever too big, they're compressed step by step (720p, 540p, 480p) until they fit.

Streamed multipart upload from the file, not loaded into memory.

In-app camera

Tap for a photo, hold to record, slide up or down while holding to zoom smoothly, release to stop. Pick from your gallery, any album, or other apps like Google Photos and Drive.

Structured place tags

Tagging a place links the post to that place's page, not just its name. Tag menu items to give the post an Order button; add ingredients to give it a Make button. Both can sit on one post.

Edit after posting

Change the caption, title, tagged place or tagged dishes later from your own profile.

Reactions

Likes (🔥) work like reviews and feed into ranking. Comments have one level of replies and their own likes. Double-tap anywhere to like.

View counts

Each post shows how many times it was played. Repeated replays by the same person in a short burst don't inflate the number, and you can hide your view counts from others.

A play counts unless that person already has 3 plays with no gap over 10 minutes.

Report

Any post can be reported from its options. Reports go to a moderation queue, on top of an automatic safety check every post goes through.

03 / Video player

Video player

Food video lives or dies on how it plays. The player was rebuilt several times on real phones to feel instant.

Hold to scrub

Hold anywhere on a video and drag up or down to move through it, with the real frames updating under your finger. Release to keep playing from there.

Playback speed

A speed pill on the paused screen cycles 0.5×, 1×, 1.25×, 1.5× and 2×, and stays the same across videos.

Landscape for long videos

The app is portrait, but videos of 3 minutes or more can be watched sideways: turn your phone and the video goes full screen, turn it back and it returns.

Smooth from the first frame

The next videos in the feed are downloaded before you reach them, so they start immediately and scrubbing backwards never re-buffers.

Local file cache, 80 MB per clip, 400 MB total, oldest pruned first.

Plays nicely with your music

Muted place previews mix with other audio like a GIF does, so they don't pause your music. The screen stays on while a video plays.

04 / Place pages

Place pages

Every restaurant, bar, café, food truck and club has a page with six tabs: Info, Menu, Media, Deals, Events and Tagged.

Live open status

Open or closed is worked out live from the weekly hours, including ranges that run past midnight. Under it: what the kitchen is serving now and until when, or a countdown to closing.

Happy hour

A pill appears within the hour before happy hour ("Happy hour in 35 min") and while it runs ("until 20:00"). Discounted dishes show the normal price crossed out and go in your cart at the happy-hour price.

Menus that follow the clock

Places can set which menu sections are served when (breakfast, lunch, after the kitchen closes). Outside those times, the sections are hidden. Dishes marked sold out disappear for the day or until they're back.

Dish details

Prices, photos, size options (25 cl or 50 cl), add-ons and supplements, multi-course tasting menus with optional supplements, and calories where known.

Ratings

One badge: the star average (★ 4.3). Above 4.1 it becomes Gas, at 2.5 or below it becomes Slop. The word replaces the number; they never show together.

Media and Tagged

Media is the place's own gallery plus approved photos people added. Tagged collects every post other people made at the place.

Wait, queue and entry

Current wait time, a walk-in queue with your ticket number and how many people are ahead, Skip the Line where offered, and entry fees with free-entry conditions.

Reservations

Request a table from the Info tab, with directions and call buttons alongside.

Trust signals

A blue check marks places that have partnered with Munchl. Unclaimed listings say so. Cuisines show their country flag ("French 🇫🇷").

Storefront pictures

Places with no photos yet show their storefront from Google Street View, with a "Wrong place?" button that hides it until it's fixed.

05 / Map and search

Map and search

The map stays a traditional "find food near me" tool, built to stay fast with places listed worldwide.

Ready when you open it

The map starts loading at app launch, with the places within 500 m of you first. Panning and zooming load what's in view.

Every place is a pin

No cluster bubbles. Zoomed out, places are small dots; zoomed in, they become full pins. Tap a pin to page through nearby places, sorted by distance.

Separate filters

Map and feed keep their own filters (cuisine, price, hours, type, rating), so filtering one doesn't change the other.

Search that forgives typing

Name search covers the whole database, ignores accents and capitals ("cafe" finds "Café"), matches any part of a name, and sorts the nearest matches first.

Postgres trigram index on unaccented, lowercased names.

Crawls and orders on the map

Public crawls nearby show as pins, and an order in progress shows the place, your destination and the driver.

06 / Ordering and tracking

Ordering and tracking

Two ways to order: from a post (exactly the dishes it tagged) or from the place's full menu. Both check out through the same screen.

The right question for where you are

Within 250 m of the place, checkout asks for your table: scan its QR code or type the number. Further away it offers pickup, delivery, or a table scheduled for later.

Scheduling

Any order can be scheduled up to a week ahead. When the place has switched it on, a scheduled table order also creates a real reservation.

Delivery

Your address is filled in from your current location (or typed). Places deliver with their own staff; Munchl passes the order and address to them.

Allergies on the ticket

Your saved allergens and diets are added to every order as "ALLERGIES: …", together with any special requests, so the kitchen sees them on the ticket.

Live tracking

Track an order on the map tab: placed, accepted, on the way, ready or delivered, with a notification at each step. For delivery you see the driver's position and an estimated arrival.

Pickup arrival sharing

For pickup orders due soon, you can share your arrival so the place sees "~8 min away" and has it ready on time. One tap stops it, and it ends when the order does.

Shared tables

Friends at the same table can join one table session and split the bill between them.

Creator attribution

An order from a post records which post it came from, so the place knows which creator sent you. That's attribution only; Munchl takes no commission on orders.

07 / Bucketlist and deals

Bucketlist and deals

Saving a place is the start of a plan, not the end of one. The bucketlist is how Munchl closes the gap between seeing and going.

Bucketlist and visited

Save any place in one tap. Places you've been move to visited. Friends can see your list if you let them.

A nudge at the right time

When you save a place, Munchl works out how long to wait before the place may send you a personal deal: about 7 days if you're local and it's a usual time for you there, 4 days if it's an unusual time, 36 hours if you're just passing through.

Only with location + personalisation consent; otherwise a default timing is used.

Deals made for you

Targeted deals show only to the people they were sent to. Short deals read like a story, long-running ones like a highlight.

Places never see where you are

A place only learns that you saved it and haven't been yet. Never your location, your patterns, or your contact details.

08 / Profiles and following

Profiles and following

Your profile is a real content profile: a grid of posts, your bucketlist, and the people you follow.

Profile

Profile photo, cover background, a bio with bold, italic and strikethrough, and an optional position title (admins can verify it, shown in gold). Hold any grid tile to peek at the post.

Private account

Turn it on and people must request to follow you; non-followers see only your profile header. Turning it off approves pending requests.

Bucketlist audience

Choose who sees your bucketlist: everyone who can see your profile, a close friends list (people aren't told they're on it), or only you.

Blocking

Blocking hides posts, comments and profiles in both directions, and hides your personal chat with that person.

Wrapped

A yearly summary of your palate: the dishes, cuisines and places you posted, ordered and visited.

09 / Chats

Chats

Personal and group chats for planning where to go, encrypted end to end.

Personal and group chats

One personal chat per pair of people; named groups of three or more. Hold a chat to mute it, delete it, or leave a group.

Rich messages

Photos and videos from your gallery, voice messages, replies to any message (including media), and emoji reactions.

Disappearing messages

Set per chat: off, 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week.

End-to-end encryption

Messages and attachments are encrypted on your phone before they're sent. Push notifications name the sender only, never the message.

X25519 + HKDF wrapping a per-message AES-256-GCM key.
10 / Crawls

Crawls

Plan a bar or food crawl as an ordered route of stops, and run it together on the night.

Build a route

Pick stops in order and set how long to spend at each (45 minutes by default). The route shows on its own map with walking directions between stops.

Share privately or publicly

Share with a private link, or make it public so people nearby can find it on the map and join.

Run it live

Start the crawl to see the next stop, its distance and time, and a countdown at the current stop. Everyone gets a "time to move" notification once per stop. Directions open in your maps app.

Locations stay private

Nobody can see where another participant is. The app only answers yes or no questions like "is the group still together?". Stale crawls expire on their own, and the organiser can end it for everyone.

11 / Cooking and recipes

Cooking and recipes

Home cooks and home bartenders post too. Their posts carry ingredients instead of menu items.

I'm cooking

Let your friends know you're cooking, then share photo and video updates as you go. When it's done, post the result in one tap.

Make

Any post with ingredients has a Make button. It checks the list against your pantry and shows what you have and what you still need.

Pantry and shopping list

Keep a pantry of what's at home. Missing ingredients go on a shopping list, which you can copy and take to the grocery site you use. Everyday staples like salt and water are never listed.

Import from a link

Paste a recipe link and Munchl reads the site's structured recipe data (ingredients and quantities). When a site blocks servers, your phone reads the page itself. The source link stays one tap away.

My recipes

Saved recipes as a photo grid, each with its ingredients and steps. "You can almost make this" suggests recipes your pantry mostly covers.

12 / Ask Munchl

Ask Munchl

Ask where to eat the way you'd text a friend. Munchl looks it up in its own places and menus instead of making places up.

Real places only

Ask Munchl searches places, opens menus and checks prices before it answers. Every place it suggests is a real one from Munchl, so it can't invent a restaurant.

Knows your needs

Your allergens and diets are taken into account, and in a group chat it combines everyone's, so a suggestion works for the whole table.

Talks like you

It answers small talk like a person, mirrors your texting style, and links each place it names so you can open it straight away.

Never just breaks

Ask as many questions as you like. They are answered in order, one after another.

13 / Dietary needs

Dietary needs

Set them once in Settings → Dietary restrictions. They filter menus, inform Ask Munchl and go on every order.

Allergens

Dairy, Egg, Gluten, Grain, Peanut, Seafood, Sesame, Shellfish, Soy, Sulfite, Tree Nut, Wheat, Mustard, Celery and Lupin.

Diets

Vegetarian, Vegan, Pescetarian, Lacto-Vegetarian, Ovo-Vegetarian and Gluten Free: the diets a dish can reliably be judged against.

Your own words

Avoid something that isn't on the list? Type it ("mushroom", "coriander"). It's matched against dish names and descriptions, including French and English equivalents.

How dishes are checked

Where a place has entered allergens, those are used. Otherwise each dish is assessed on your phone from its name, description and menu section in English, French, Italian and Spanish. Set menus aren't guessed.

Always confirm serious allergies with the place; the ticket tells them too.
14 / Notifications

Notifications

Push notifications for the things that matter, with switches for everything.

What you're told about

Likes, comments, replies and comment likes; new followers, follow requests and approvals; messages and reactions; order updates; your queue number being called; crawl moves; badges.

Muting

Turn categories off in Settings → Notifications, or mute a single chat. Muted notifications aren't stored at all, not just hidden.

Private by default

Chat notifications show who wrote, never what they wrote. A notification opens the exact page it's about.

15 / Platforms and sharing

Platforms and sharing

Where Munchl runs, and what happens when you share something.

iPhone, Android and web

Apps for iPhone and Android, and the same app in any browser at app.munchl.com.

Share links that preview

Shared posts, places, table codes and crawls open as a proper page at munchl.com with a preview picture, the menu and hours, even for people without the app.

Back works like you expect

Back steps through the pages you visited in order, across tabs, and only closes the app on the first page.

Link typeFormat
Post linksmunchl.com/p/<post>
Place linksmunchl.com/restaurant/<place>
Table QR codesmunchl.com/t/<place>/<table>
Crawl invitesmunchl.com/i/<code>

Try it on your phone or in your browser.

Free, no card needed. Your bucketlist starts with one tap.

App Store · coming soon Google Play · coming soon Try it in your browser →