MediGlobe
An offline-first medication reference for travelers: 3,250 medications across 13 countries, in 10 languages.
The problem
You are in a pharmacy in another country, holding a box you cannot read, trying to find the local equivalent of a medication you take at home. Brand names change at every border. The active ingredient does not.
Every existing answer to this assumes you have signal. In a foreign pharmacy that is exactly what you do not have, or what costs a fortune per megabyte.
The decision
Offline is the product, not a feature. Everything ships on the device: the full reference, the search, even the map. If the app needs a connection to answer the question, it has failed at the only moment that matters.
The site and the app are one argument, not two. The website is not a download page with a screenshot. It carries the same reference logic and the same claims, so a visitor can judge whether the thing is worth installing before they install it.
Dark, technical, calm. Deep green-black with a mint accent and teal, set in Space Grotesk throughout. This is a reference tool consulted under mild stress. It needed to read as an instrument, not a brochure.
The build
The reference itself. 3,250 medications across 13 countries, in 10 languages, with dosage data, plus 232 symptoms and 83 first-aid cards. Assembled and cross-checked rather than licensed, including automated linters that compare the language versions against each other to catch a Polish string that wandered into the Italian file, or a dosage that disagrees with itself between two languages.
A website in three languages. Russian, English and Ukrainian, each maintained as a full version rather than a machine translation of the other two.
An offline map. Leaflet bundled into the app with a tile cache in IndexedDB, so the pharmacy locator keeps working with the radio off.
The parts nobody sees. First-party crash reporting into a Cloudflare Worker rather than a third-party SDK. Analytics behind a real consent gate that defaults to denied and stays denied until the visitor chooses. No secrets in the app bundle: everything that needs a key goes through a Worker proxy.
Where it stands
The Android app is published and live on Google Play. The site is live in all three languages.
What another client can take from this
Most of the cost in a project like this is not the visible surface. It is the consistency work underneath: making language versions agree with each other, keeping the site's claims and the product's behavior in sync, catching the one string that drifted.
That work is invisible when it is done right and glaring when it is not, which is why it tends to get cut from a quote and then bite in month three.