Do you feel your startup’s growth is at a standstill and that it is technology that is bringing it down?

Startups often struggle with choosing between native mobile technologies and cross-platform frameworks such as React Native. The former may offer superior performance in some cases, especially for very complex apps, but it may come at a cost.

Travelia first developed its product as two separate native mobile apps – for Android and iOS.

But as the product continued to grow, the client experienced issues:

• Lack of consistency – each feature had to be developed twice, making it increasingly difficult to maintain uniformity between two separate codebases.
• UX headaches – the lack of consistency in the code led to each app behaving slightly differently, which affected UX.
• Technical debt – resolving these differences took time, which could have been used for code maintenance.
• Maintenance costs – lack of time elevates maintenance issues over time as they accumulate. 
• Slow time-to-market – all of these problems led to slow release cycles, further complicated by the need to simultaneously push upgrades and fixes to 40+ of business clients. Travelia’s deployment pipeline needed to be streamlined and simplified. 

Travelia had a lot of new feature ideas, but they felt like they were hitting a wall in terms of scalability and efficiency.

The Software House has previously provided DevOps support and implemented security improvements for Travelia’s AWS-based architecture. They decided to trust us again.

The Software House fielded a fully autonomous team on short notice. The team included an experienced React Native lead developer.

The initial team consisted of a designer, three React Native developers, a QA engineer, and a project manager.

In 10 months of development, Travelia resolved all its scalability, deployment, and UX issues. What’s more, the new React Native app quickly outperformed the legacy apps in terms of user adoption.

Let’s break down the development into the application and the deployment pipeline, both of which received a complete overhaul.

Maintenance costs down by 40%, user adoption up by 31,6%

The development of the new application resolved all of the consistency, maintenance, and legacy debt issues that troubled the two native apps. Overall, the maintenance costs dropped by 40% for the mobile app and by 25% for the production environment.

But that was to be expected. The true standout was the look and feel of the brand-new React Native app.

The Android and iOS apps included a progressive web app loaded within them. It required the user to log in again and use web screens that didn’t offer the best UX on mobile devices. The new React Native app eliminated the PWA and introduced a single sign-on.

These changes significantly improved UX, which showed in increased app usage. Pre-COVID, 60% of users logged in to book in the apps. Post-development, it rose to 79% – a 31.6% increase.

The deployment is streamlined and largely automated

The previous deployment scheme struggled with maintaining consistency between the two apps and limited task automation.

The pipeline remains quite complex, but the automation powered by the fastlane platform minimizes manual tasks.

In addition, test procedures that ensure no faulty deployments are implemented. They allow for frequent updates without disrupting work, improving time-to-market. All deployments now need approval. Users can also request app builds on demand.

Technologies

React Native, fastlane (development and release automation), Figma (design)

A bright future ahead – no more wall!

The React Native app is up and running, but our work with Travelia continues.

The Software House is in charge of maintaining the Node.js-based backend, which has been completely developed using serverless technology to provide unlimited scalability.

We’re also working on an AI-based assistant for the Travelia app. It answers user queries in context. For example, the user can ask the assistant if their hotel gives access to a specific service. 

The tool uses a combination of open-source and commercial generative AI models.