Cocktail Hobbyist 3.0 Is Here

It’s out. Cocktail Hobbyist 3.0.0 is live on the App Store and Google Play — the redesign we wrote about a couple of days ago is finished and on your phone.

What you’ll see

The whole app got a new visual language: a fresh typeface, restyled cards and controls, and a floating bottom bar that glides between tabs instead of sitting there as a flat strip. The menu has been redesigned too, so getting around finally feels deliberate rather than accumulated.

A few screens changed enough to be worth calling out:

• Cocktail pages are now full-bleed. The photo fills the screen and the recipe lives in a sheet over it, with a strength badge on the image so you know what you’re getting into before you read a single line.
• The cocktails list is cleaner and easier to scan, with an A–Z index down the side and a have/need ratio on every entry, so you can see at a glance what’s actually within reach tonight.
• Explore has been reorganized into Community, Recently Viewed and Classic Choices — three clear shelves instead of one long scroll.
• Rating a recipe has its own moment now. Tap rate, and you get five stars on a red-to-green ramp, from “Not for me” to “Absolutely loved it!”, plus a notes field if you want to write down what you’d change next time.

And the one we’ve wanted for years: full dark mode, properly done across every screen, plus custom themes if you’d rather pick your own colors.

The half you won’t see

Underneath the new paint, the app is essentially a new codebase. New navigation, a rewritten storage layer, screens broken into pieces that can be tested on their own. We backed the whole rebuild with roughly 2,650 automated tests and pixel-by-pixel comparisons, precisely so a redesign this large wouldn’t quietly break the things that already worked.

Your data comes along untouched. The first launch after updating migrates your bar cabinet, notes and favorites automatically, and keeps the old copy in place as a safety net while it does.

A pile of long-standing annoyances went out with this release as well: photo backups no longer lose quality or leave duplicates behind, restoring a backup now genuinely replaces everything it says it will, a phone call no longer restarts a voice-guided recipe from the top, and the app launches faster because it no longer reads your entire photo library on the way in.

What this makes possible

We’ll be honest about what a rebuild does and doesn’t do: it doesn’t add features by itself. What it changes is how long the next feature takes. The reason this release was quiet for so long is that every small idea used to turn into a week of careful archaeology. That’s the part we fixed. The next few updates should feel a lot less rare.

Thank you

Genuinely — thank you to everyone who’s kept the app on their phone through the years when it barely changed. That’s the only reason a rebuild this size was worth doing.

If 3.0 lands well for you, a rating or a short review on your store helps more than we can explain; it’s most of how people find us. And if something’s off, tell us on Instagram at @cocktails.hobbyist — we’d rather hear it from you than read it in a one-star review.

Version history lives at What’s New, and the update is waiting for you on the App Store and Google Play. Cheers.