Hostel Mess Menu Android App

In every college hostel, the mess menu is simultaneously the most-asked-about and worst-distributed piece of information on campus — pinned as a crumpled printout on a notice board nobody reads, or buried in a WhatsApp group under a hundred good-morning forwards. Students walk to the mess not knowing what is served, special meals need coupon booking with opaque deadlines, and the mess committee gets feedback only as corridor complaints. A dedicated mess app fixes all three: today's menu with live serving status, the week's plan for planning ahead, and a structured feedback channel with ratings the committee can actually act on. This project implements that as a native Android app with offline menu caching, meal countdowns, dish ratings and a committee feedback pipeline.

1. The menu dataset (days × meals × dishes with timings and flags) is bundled and cached in a Room database on first launch.
2. The home screen resolves the current time against meal windows to highlight the active meal and compute the countdown to service end.
3. Dish ratings are stored per user per dish; the app aggregates them into per-dish averages and a weekly mess score shown on the feedback screen.
4. Feedback submissions (rating + comment) are queued locally and marked for the committee's weekly review cycle.
5. Special meals carry metadata (coupon required, deadline, quantity cap) rendered as notice banners with booking instructions.
6. A background refresh checks for menu updates when connectivity is available and silently refreshes the cache.

Tech stack:

• Kotlin
• Android Jetpack (MVVM)
• Room (menu + ratings cache)
• WorkManager (background refresh)
• Notifications API (special-meal alerts)
• Material Design 3
• Retrofit (menu sync endpoint)

• [Today's menu with live status] Breakfast, lunch and dinner cards show timings, dishes and a "serving now" highlight with a countdown to service end.
• [Weekly menu view] The full week's dinner specials ahead, so students can plan — including coupon-only specials with booking deadlines.
• [Per-dish ratings] Students rate individual dishes; averages are computed per dish and per week for a transparent quality signal.
• [Committee feedback channel] Structured feedback (rating + optional comment) routed to the mess committee's weekly review, replacing corridor complaints.
• [Veg/non-veg indicators] Standard veg/non-veg marks on every dish, with the day's special clearly labeled.
• [Offline menu cache] The week's menu is cached on-device, so it loads instantly even with poor hostel Wi-Fi.
• [Special-meal alerts] Coupon-based specials (e.g. Sunday chicken curry) carry booking-deadline notices so nobody misses out.

• Complete Android app source code (Kotlin)
• Menu dataset schema + sample week data
• Committee review workflow document
• Project report PDF (data model, rating aggregation, offline caching, sync design)
• PPT presentation for final review
• Viva Q&A preparation document (Room, WorkManager, aggregation queries, offline-first)

• Menu data is only as current as its last update — the app shows the data timestamp so staleness is visible, and sudden kitchen changes cannot be reflected instantly.
• Ratings reflect the students who bother to rate; the report discusses this self-selection bias honestly.
• The committee review workflow is a designed process (weekly digest), not an enforced ticketing system.
• Coupon booking for specials is informational (deadline + instructions), not a payment/booking integration.
• One hostel/mess per install in this build; multi-mess support is designed but not implemented.
• Feedback is anonymous-aggregated by design; individual complaint tracking is out of scope.