Cocktail Hobbyist Is Getting a Redesign

Hi, it’s the Cocktail Hobbyist team — a quick heads up on something we’ve been quietly working on for a while: a redesign of the app.

If you’ve had Cocktail Hobbyist on your phone for a bit, you’ll know the look hasn’t changed much over the years. We’re changing that. We’re rebuilding the visual language from the ground up: a cleaner typeface, a flatter and more modern look, a redesigned menu, a reworked explore feed, and a cocktail page that puts the photo front and center with the details in a sheet over it. Buttons, the bottom bar, dialogs — all getting the same treatment, so the app finally feels like one coherent thing instead of a patchwork of screens added over the years.

That’s the part you’ll see. Behind it, we’ve been doing something less visible but just as important: rebuilding the app’s internal foundation. The old codebase had grown organically over a long time, and it was starting to slow us down — every new feature took longer to build safely than it should have. So we’ve spent months untangling it: new navigation, a rewritten storage layer, and screens broken down into pieces that are actually possible to test and improve on their own. We backed all of it with close to 2,650 automated tests and pixel-by-pixel comparisons, specifically so this rebuild doesn’t quietly break the things that already work.

One thing we want to be upfront about: your bar cabinet, your notes and your favorites aren’t going anywhere. The new storage engine migrates your data automatically the first time you open the updated app, and it keeps your old data untouched as a safety net while it does. Nothing you’ve built up gets lost in the move.

While we’ve been at it, we’ve also fixed a handful of nagging bugs along the way. Photo backups no longer lose quality or leave duplicates behind. Restoring a backup now actually restores everything it should. A voice-guided recipe survives a phone call instead of restarting from scratch. And the app should feel snappier overall, since launch no longer has to read through your entire photo library first.

We don’t have a release date to share yet — we’d rather ship this right than ship it fast — but we wanted you to know it’s coming, and why it’s taking a while.

In the meantime, the website already got its own overhaul. All 274 cocktail recipes are now browsable at /cocktails/, and if you’re not sure what to make tonight, the What can I make? finder will figure it out from what’s already in your cabinet. Have a look around.

If you have thoughts on the redesign, screenshots you’re hoping for, or just want to say hi, find us on Instagram at @cocktails.hobbyist — we read everything.

And if you don’t have the app yet, grab it free on the App Store or Google Play.