Original build
Xamarin.Forms
I used the framework I knew to prove the idea and get a working product into people's hands.
Personal project · iOS and Android
San Bidet: from an urgent restroom search to a useful community map
I built San Bidet to help people find restrooms with bidets around the Philippines.
In short: San Bidet began as a Xamarin.Forms side project built on a Hackintosh. It later moved through .NET MAUI and is now built with React Native and Expo, with stability and the core map experience taking priority.
- Role
- Founder, designer, developer
- Platforms
- iOS and Android
- Current stack
- React Native and Expo
- Status
- Available on both stores
The idea came from a very practical problem: I urgently needed a restroom with a bidet at SM North EDSA and could not find one.
How it started
During that emergency, I went from restroom to restroom without finding a bidet. I eventually made do with a bottle of water. Later, I saw people sharing bidet locations through scattered social posts and realized the information would be more useful as a searchable, location-based product.
I did not own a Mac, so I turned my existing PC into a Hackintosh and used the cross-platform framework I knew: Xamarin.Forms. The setup was imperfect, but it was enough to build and ship the first version.
The product had to grow beyond my own list
A restroom directory only stays useful when its location data keeps improving. Community submissions became an important part of San Bidet: people could contribute locations, while the product needed a practical way to review and maintain that information.
- Make nearby locations easy to scan on a map.
- Let the community contribute knowledge I could not gather alone.
- Keep submissions manageable enough to review instead of publishing untrusted data automatically.
Three generations of cross-platform development
Later migration
.NET MAUI
The application was later migrated to .NET MAUI. I am intentionally leaving the exact migration date undocumented here rather than guessing.
Current build
React Native and Expo
The current version uses React Native and Expo, with maintainability and a stable core experience guiding the rebuild.
Downtime changed the order of priorities
San Bidet had a period of downtime. When I rebuilt it, the first priority was stability—not immediately recreating every feature. The useful lesson was straightforward: keeping the core map dependable matters more than expanding an unreliable product.
The app remains available on iOS and Android, and its story has been covered by local publications.
What I learned
A useful idea can outlive the framework it started in. San Bidet also reinforced that community data is a product responsibility: submissions, review, and reliability have to be designed as part of the experience.
Have a problem worth solving?
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