Scaling and Modernizing a Location-Based Social Media App

About the Project

A geolocation-based social media app that helps users connect with people nearby. With over 2 million monthly active users, the client needed reliable engineering support to modernize a legacy codebase, maintain high performance and deliver new features consistently.

The app had been in development since 2014, and Exadel joined the project in 2015 to support ongoing development and modernization of the iOS platform as part of the client’s core product team.

Business Challenge

The iOS app was originally written in Objective-C, with parts of the legacy codebase becoming harder to maintain and scale. The customer needed help migrating to Swift, implementing complex new features like private chat, and maintaining a high level of performance and stability.

Contributions

As part of the client’s product team, we contributed to the ongoing modernization and feature development of the iOS app:

• Migrated key components from Objective-C to Swift for better performance and maintainability
• Adopted SwiftUI for new and static screens to accelerate UI development
• Contributed to a fully custom private chat system which includes a two-sided invitation flow, image sharing and voice memo support
• Integrated a flexible monetization system, including in-app purchases, subscriptions, and paid features like post boosts, read receipts, and gifts
• Helped implement a user moderation system, allowing trusted users to review flagged content based on their reputation and karma
• Supported a complex ad delivery system using Google Ad Manager (GAM), dynamically inserting banners from multiple external sources into user feeds
• Supported a data-driven release cycle with A/B testing and analytics usage

Key Expertise

This project highlights our ability to ship a wide range of features inside a fast-moving, large-scale consumer app:

• Contributed to wide range of features, from private chat and dynamic UI to ads, monetization, content moderation, and analytics
• Helped modernize the app by carefully migrating legacy Objective-C code to Swift while keeping things stable and production-ready
• Contributed to core features like location-aware feeds and replies, enabling real-time conversations with people nearby
• Designed features with local communities in mind, supporting geo-targeted rollouts, A/B tests, and market-specific segmentation
• Acted as a long-term, trusted member of the product team, helping ship new releases every two weeks to millions of users