BoomBar: Stop carrying dozens of loyalty and reward cards around !

BoomBar started in April 2015, the month the first Apple Watch shipped. The pitch was simple: if a watch was going to replace your wallet, the cards in it had to go somewhere. iMessage apps arrived the following year and sharing a card became part of a conversation instead of a screenshot. Porting to Android this year forced the question we had been avoiding. Sharing that only works iPhone to iPhone isn't sharing, it's a club. So we put the whole card inside the link itself: number, symbology, name, colours. That one decision removed the upload, the account and the server copy all at once, and it meant a card could open for someone with no app at all, in a plain browser. The process changed with it. Building the same feature three times over, in Swift, Kotlin and JavaScript, is unforgiving: the three have to agree on what a colour is and what a barcode is, or the card a friend sees is not the card you sent. That discipline turned up things we had shipped without noticing, including a column that had silently been null for every card ever saved.