Making the product native and directing the rewrite around it
- 500k+
- users
- 2
- mobile platforms
- Web → native
- incremental rewrite
HelpBnk's mobile app was a WebView shell around the existing web product. I turned it into a native React Native product and helped direct the wider rewrite: establishing the application shell and navigation, defining the boundary between legacy web and native surfaces, and rebuilding the home feed, search, notifications, deep links, and media.
The migration remained incremental because the existing product could not stop serving users while the replacement was built. The difficult work lived in the seams: routing between both runtimes, keeping feed rows cheap under load, transferring video between inline and fullscreen ownership, handling gesture interruption and startup, and instrumenting the app well enough to distinguish a working rewrite from a convincing demo.
What I learned
An incremental migration only works when ownership is legible. The same applies to performance: a benchmark matters when it is anchored to a named user journey and the evidence survives the profiling session.
