Stomachs grumble as a group of students approach Ferris Booth Commons at 9:15 p.m. only to discover that their favorite dining hall is closed. Upset, they look up the other available dining options only to find that JJ’s is the only dining hall open. This is a common Columbia student experience—but a new student-designed app aims to improve it.

In recent years, Columbia students have relied on dining hours and menu listings dispersed across Columbia and Barnard’s websites to plan their next meal on campus. Others physically check which dining halls are open. Now, a new app—MealChoi—promises to make choosing which dining hall to go to and when to go to it easier for Columbia students.

Ian Choi, SEAS ’25, the founder of MealChoi, created the app hoping to provide a platform that makes dining less tedious for students. When he talked to friends about the experience of stumbling upon a closed dining hall or checking separate Barnard and Columbia dining websites, Choi discovered that other students were also frustrated by this inconvenience. Maria Lapati, SEAS ’25, would like access to information on both Barnard and Columbia dining halls in one place, as she has “never been able to check Barnard’s menu.” Choi’s app aims to do just this.

“With my app, it only requires two clicks to check the menu, and [with] just one click you can check the opening hours, and [see] whether it’s open or not,” Choi said.

Choi spent 500 hours developing the iOS application which launched in September and centralizes the hours and menus for each dining hall and café. Though the app is already available on Apple’s App Store, Choi still hopes to incorporate many more features to make the app more user-friendly and less labor-intensive.

Noah Czelusta, SEAS ’24, also noted the speed of the app compared to Columbia’s website. Loaded with extraneous information, the dining sites often present students with slow downloading times. This is one of the key problems Choi was determined to fix.

“I don’t like having to go to a different website, and … I’ve experienced trouble with the Internet [when loading the websites],” Geraldine Nina, SEAS ’25, said.

Choi continuously updates MealChoi to make the user interface even more streamlined. As a computer science major, he hoped to apply some of his preexisting skills to this project. However, the other coding languages he had learned, such as C and Java, are not geared toward improving user interface. So Choi began teaching himself SwiftUI, a coding language made by Apple to develop iOS applications. As Choi learned SwiftUI in order to develop his app, he “fell in love” with the language.

Although the app has been launched, Choi still faces several internal problems, especially with aggregating dining information in a database. In order to collect all of the information about the dining halls, their opening hours, and which meals they are serving, Choi had to create his own virtual system to organize and store all of this information.

Since the hours and menu information for different dining halls are stored in different ways, Choi has found it difficult to integrate the information into the application’s code. Hence, he has resorted to manually typing all of the information. While he currently updates the app daily, Choi is looking for a way to collect all of the dining information so he can create an automated daily update for the app.

As for additional features, Choi intends on incorporating campus news sources and other entertainment features to make the app a one-stop shop for ensuring an ideal dining experience. He also aims to add money-making opportunities for students, such as CashWalk, where students could complete certain tasks, like walking, for monetary prizes. Additionally, some students hope that the feature to view the real-time capacity of each dining hall will be incorporated soon, as it could factor in when deciding where to eat.

Although the app has improvements on the way, Columbia students like Czelusta mentioned that MealChoi has already made their dining hall experience easier.

“I use [the app] multiple times a day, it’s much easier than going on either the Columbia or Barnard dining websites. … And it’s also much easier and faster to find the information I need,” Czelusta said.