The Problem

Patent submission is broken - lengthy forms, no unified platform, and almost zero transparency post-submission. There’s no reason given for rejections, no way to follow up, and no consolidated view for companies managing multiple patents.

I built PatentEase as a mobile-first solution that handles the entire patent lifecycle: submission, tracking, similarity analysis, and file management - all in one app.

Features

• Real-time dashboard with notification cards and clickable status counters across four states (approved, in review, pending, rejected)
• Streamlined submission - one form for patents, trademarks, and copyrights, with PDF uploads and auto-generated application numbers (e.g., PAT-2023-0002)
• Color-coded tracking with status filtering and tap-to-detail navigation
• File management - searchable two-column grid with PDF preview, signed URL downloads (60s expiry), and native share integration
• ML-powered similarity checker that flags overlapping patents before submission
• Theming and accessibility - full dark/light mode, language support scaffolding, and password management with compliance-grade validation

Technical Deep Dive

Similarity Checker

The most technically challenging feature. When a user views a patent’s details, the pipeline runs:

1. Existing patents are fetched from Singapore’s IPOS via their public API
2. Both existing and submitted patents are vector-encoded
3. Cosine similarity is computed against the corpus with a configurable threshold (default 0.7)
4. Top 3 matches are returned with scores and downloadable documents

I built this as a separate FastAPI microservice rather than embedding it in the main backend - this kept the ML pipeline isolated, independently deployable, and non-blocking through async file processing. The main app communicates with it via REST, so swapping out the encoding model or scaling the service independently is trivial.

Architecture

I chose Supabase over a custom backend for a reason - it gave me auth, PostgreSQL, object storage, and real-time subscriptions out of the box, letting me focus engineering time on the features that actually differentiated the product (similarity checker, tracking UX).

• Auth: Supabase Auth with email/password, session persistence via AsyncStorage, and compliance-grade password validation (8+ chars, letters, numbers, special characters)
• Real-time: PostgreSQL Changes subscription on the notifications table. The dashboard auto-refreshes every 5 seconds, with notification types (new-patent, status-change) driving the UI
• Storage: Patent PDFs uploaded to Supabase object storage with signed URLs generated on-demand (60-second validity for security)
• Frontend: React Native 0.76 + Expo 52 with file-based routing (Expo Router), React Native Paper for Material Design, and Reanimated for fluid animations

Testing & Quality

I applied both black-box and white-box testing methodologies:

• Equivalence class partitioning to define valid/invalid input groups across login and submission flows
• Boundary value analysis for edge cases (empty fields, malformed emails, weak passwords, mismatched confirmations)
• Control flow graph analysis - the login flow had a cyclomatic complexity of 5, meaning 5 independent paths requiring coverage. All paths were tested and passed

Key Learnings

A few things I’d carry forward from this project:

Microservice boundaries matter. Isolating the similarity checker as its own FastAPI service was the best architectural decision I made. It could be developed, tested, and deployed independently - when I needed to adjust the encoding pipeline, the main app didn’t need a single change.

Test before you code. Writing test cases first (equivalence classes, boundary values, control flow paths) caught edge cases I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Every test passed on the first integration run - that doesn’t happen by accident.

Pick your abstractions wisely. Supabase handled auth, storage, and real-time so I didn’t have to. That freed up time to build the similarity checker and polish the UX - the parts that actually made the product worth using.