The airport parking app

What it is

A parking app for people with cars. Find parking near a place, book a space at a bookable car park or just drive in, and the number plate is the pass.

It is being built for a company that runs airport car parks. It launches on Android and iPhone from one codebase.

How it works

Open the app and a 3D car, drawn like a designer’s technical sketch, reverse-parks into a bay. Sign in with a phone code or Google, add your number plate and pick a city. A calm map shows nearby car parks: the client’s own, with a live count of free spaces, and other parking as a guide.

Book ahead or for a long stay, pay in the app, and the pass is simply your plate. While you are parked you can add time, and when you leave you get a receipt.

The plate is the pass

The car park’s gate company installs the barriers and the number plate cameras, and reports each entry and exit to the app. The app turns those events into a stay: the count of free spaces, a reminder before time runs out, extra time you can buy while parked, and the receipt.

Built not to overbook

The part that has to be right is a booking. Two people tapping book on the last space at the same moment must not both get it. A test fires many bookings at one space at once, and it fails on the naive version of the code before it passes on ours.

Built to be trusted

Sign-in codes are stored only as a hash and expire after five minutes. Deleting an account leaves no personal data behind: payment records stay for accounting, with nothing that names the person. A test proves the delete cannot race a booking or a late payment.

Fast on a real phone

On a release build, the 3D launch scene draws its first frame in about 1.4 seconds and holds more than 100 frames a second on a 120 Hz phone. Measured on 4 and 5 October 2026, on one phone.

Where it stands

As of 9 October 2026 this is still in development.

• Built and run on Android phones: sign-in, the map, booking, payment in test mode, the pass, the parked screen, extra time, receipts, the profile and account deletion.
• Not yet: the store listings, which wait on the client’s company accounts. The connection to the real gates, which waits on the gate company’s documents; until then the app is exercised with a built-in gate simulator. The client’s own car parks, which replace a sample one when his details arrive. iPhone builds.

How it is built

React Native with Expo for Android and iPhone, a small TypeScript API on Vercel, Postgres on Neon, Cloudflare R2 for photos, and Razorpay and Cashfree for payments.