CRAWLER V2

Cross-platform rebuild. iOS + Android. 26 days.

iOS Android Shipped Jan 27 2026

The founder was constantly putting out fires. The app was fragile. Every release was terrifying.

A complete ground-up rewrite of the mobile app on React Native and Expo, against the existing NestJS backend. Two engineers: me on frontend, one backend engineer. 26 days from kickoff to both store listings, with intense device-level testing on both iOS and Android the whole way.

The constraint that mattered most: replace the live iOS and Play Store apps without losing existing rankings or breaking the user base. Day-one stable on both platforms, no rollback, no hotfix-week.

Cross-platform parity isn’t theoretical here. Both apps shipped from the same codebase, on the same day, with feature equivalence.

App Store Connect, first-time downloads. The flat line is 18 months on the original app. The step is V2, driving lifetime downloads from 6.1K to 19.7K in three months.

RATING RECOVERY

Three months post-rebuild. The Play Store is climbing back from 3.0. The App Store is holding 4.9★ across triple the review volume.

PLAY STORE

3.0 → 3.9★

And climbing. Android wasn’t treated as a second-class citizen.

APP STORE

4.9★

Scaled 18 → 52+ reviews post-launch, locking in a 4.9★ average.

PRODUCT SENSE & UI

I don’t just blindly translate Figma mockups into Expo. If a design choice looks amateur or the UX flow is fragile, I fix it on the device before it ever ships.

A few wins from this rebuild:

Killing amateur UI. The agency handoff relied on fully pill-shaped buttons that made the app look dated. I unilaterally tightened the border radii to a modern rounded-md and shipped it. The agency CEO and the founder loved the upgrade — no pushback, no extra design rounds.
Ruthless componentization. The mockups for the NYC venue listings included 10+ ad-hoc button variants. I scrapped the bloat, built a strict token-based component system, and standardized the entire UI.
Growth engineering. I didn’t wait for PM tickets. I proposed and shipped the native in-app review flow that drove the spike in App Store reviews, and built the push/SMS re-engagement loops that automatically pulled lapsed users back in.

Every V1 release had to be supervised by the CTO. V2 ships async.

6.1K → 19.7K downloads in 3 months. 4.9★. Day-one stable on both stores.