Building Price Buddy: The Challenges Behind Creating a Realtime Fuel Price App for Nigeria

At first, I thought the app would mainly focus on maps, prices, and locations.

But the bigger question quickly became: “How do users know which prices are reliable?”

Fuel prices can change very quickly, especially in busy areas. A price updated six hours ago may already be outdated. Even worse, different users might submit conflicting prices for the same station.

That changed how I approached the product.

Instead of treating fuel prices as static information, I started thinking about them as confidence-based data.

The goal became helping users judge reliability for themselves instead of pretending the data was always perfect.

One issue that looked simple at first was saved stations. Users could save and unsave stations successfully, but the updates weren’t reflecting properly across all screens.

A station might appear saved on the home screen but not show correctly inside the saved page. The problem came from disconnected local state.

Different parts of the app were managing their own versions of station data instead of relying on a centralized source of truth.

Fixing this required restructuring how state was shared across the application so changes updated everywhere instantly. Once that was resolved, the app immediately felt more polished and consistent.

Fuel comparison apps naturally contain a lot of information: prices, timestamps, verification status, station details, saved states, and distance.

The challenge was displaying all of that without making the interface feel cluttered. I spent a lot of time thinking about hierarchy: what users should notice first and what should stay secondary.

Small design decisions like spacing, typography, and visual emphasis ended up making a huge difference.

One thing I wanted Price Buddy to reflect was the reality of using apps in Nigeria. Internet connections are not always stable. Data can become outdated quickly. Users may rely on older devices.

That influenced several engineering decisions throughout development. The app needed to remain useful even when information was incomplete or connections were unstable.

Instead of assuming perfect conditions, I focused on making the experience resilient.

Building Price Buddy taught me that many software challenges are not purely technical.

A lot of the real work happens around trust, user expectations, and product behavior. The interesting part wasn’t just building a fuel price app. It was figuring out how to help users feel confident using information that constantly changes.

And honestly, that’s a much harder problem than it first appears.