Lineage Lab

I was curious about grape genetics and I had the tools to build something. Most of what I'd read on the subject lived in dense academic research papers or detailed sheets.

Grape variety genealogy is one of those subjects where the more you pull on it, the more it unravels. Most of what people assume is ancient and fixed turns out to be surprisingly recent.

The data that exists on this is well-researched and academically solid. The way a variety originates in one place and then spreads, crosses, and spawns offspring across different countries over centuries. A tree diagram could show the relationships. A map could show the geography. I wanted to build something that held both at once.

The globe as an entry point

The opening view is a satellite globe with country flag markers placed at their geographic positions. Tapping a country surfaces the varieties grown there. This makes origin the primary navigation rather than an alphabetical list. You start with place, then arrive at the variety.

Genetics as core mechanic

Each variety page shows its parent varieties above and its offspring below, with the country of origin and the countries it's currently grown in. Tapping Pinot Noir takes you to its parents, tapping Chardonnay shows you that Pinot Noir is one of them. The genetics become a path through the data rather than a footnote at the bottom of a page.

Visual language of the variety

Each variety is represented by a coloured sphere. It's a simple decision but it gives every screen a consistent anchor and makes variety pages immediately distinguishable from each other at a glance.

Lineage Lab was my first full iOS app build, developed using Claude Code. I wanted to understand what it actually took to take a design from Figma to a shipped app on the App Store, and the subject matter gave me enough genuine interest to push through the parts that were difficult.

Lineage Lab currently has 317 installs with no marketing or promotion behind it.

Showing how a variety spreads outward from its origin country across the globe over time is a feature that is still unbuilt. That geographical spread view is the next version of the product, and it's the thing that would make the genetics and the geography fully earn each other.

The most useful thing this project taught me wasn't about grape genetics. It was about the gap between a well-designed data structure and a product that gives people a reason to return. What it doesn't yet do is reward continued use. There's no deepening relationship with the content over time, no reason to come back once you've explored the varieties you already know. That's the design problem the next version needs to solve, and I'm clearer about it now than I was when I started.