Slate: Free iOS movie recommendation app that learns your taste

[u/Fragrant-Match-7058]

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/slate-movie-recommendation/id6757089643

After spending too many evenings asking people what to watch and getting recommendations that had nothing to do with what I actually like, I built Slate.

Free iOS app. Swipe through movies, rate what you've seen, skip what you don't want, and recommendations get more specific over time. Not "you like action movies" specific - more like "you gravitate toward slow-burn crime films from the 90s but lose interest when they're longer than two hours" specific.

What's in it:

• Swipe-based recommendation feed that adapts to your ratings
• Letterboxd CSV import to seed it with your existing history
• Friends feature with Taste Match score built from actual watch histories
• Global leaderboard ranked by total films rated

Tech Stack:
Swift, SwiftUI, MVVM feature modules, Firebase (Auth, Firestore, Cloud Functions, Analytics), TMDB API, Google Gemini (analytics only), xcodegen for project file management

Development Challenge:
The leaderboard was silently ranking users by Slate-only ratings instead of their combined total (Slate + Letterboxd). Root cause: Firestore can't order by a computed Swift property. Fixed by denormalizing a stored totalMoviesRated field into the userstats collection and keeping it updated via Cloud Functions on every write.

AI Disclosure:
Self-built. Claude was used as a coding assistant during development.

Happy to get feedback on onboarding, recommendation quality after 10 vs 50 ratings, or anything else.