Social
Connect Us Mobile
A React Native social app with auth, profiles, photo uploads, and the kind of dark-mode toggle people actually expect. Firebase under the hood.
iOS+Android
Day One
<1wk
Per Major Feature
How it came together
The setup
A small social product needed an MVP that felt native, not a wrapped webview. Auth, profiles, photo uploads: the table stakes had to be solid.
The challenge
Ship a real social app in a few sprints, without skimping on the boring parts (auth, image uploads, settings persistence).
Scale
Public-beta mobile app on iOS and Android.
The hard parts
Non-negotiables
- Photos cannot blow up the Firebase bill
- Settings survive an app reinstall via account, not device
- TypeScript everywhere
Trade-offs we made
- Picked Firestore over a relational backend. Faster MVP, but graph-style social queries will need a rewrite at scale.
- Bottom-tab navigation only. Side menus are a v2 problem.
Calls I made
Cloudinary for media
Pulled photo uploads off Firebase Storage and onto Cloudinary. Cheaper at scale, and the transformations API beat what we would have built ourselves.
NativeWind over StyleSheet
Tailwind classes on React Native components. The design system stays the same as the web app.