|

Thriva

Accelerating Thriva’s Health App Time-to-Market, Development, and Dev Team Mastery

Let’s talk about your project

As we embarked on our mobile app journey, Callstack played an essential role in helping us release our mobile app to the market. They helped us set up and optimise our mobile ecosystem allowing us to build upon our app with speed and confidence. Their support through training and workshops made sure we could successfully grow our mobile team and know-how.

Donovan Isherwood

-

Engineering Manager

In brief

We optimized the client’s mobile app performance and introduced a custom tool to measure performance regressions. We set up performance tests and documentation to enable a seamless transition of knowledge with the in-house team of developers.

Client Info

Entain is one of the world’s largest sports betting and gaming entertainment groups.

Industry

Commercial gaming

Company type

Enterprise

Region

Australia, Asia & Oceania

Tech Info

Performance optimization project with the best practices, approaches & tech solutions

Technologies

React Native | Native

Platforms

iOS | Android

Stack

Redux | Tanstack | Reassure | GraphQL

Performance Boost

87.5%

In 87.5% of the screens, the number of rerenders decreased or remained the same, which affected the acceleration of the initial performance.

In brief

Thriva is a healthcare testing provider that offers personalized home blood tests. They are on a mission to help people worldwide to easily track and improve their health, knowing what’s going on in their bodies. With a simple finger-prick blood test, users can measure their liver function, HbA1c levels, vitamin D level, cholesterol level, thyroid profile, testosterone, and many more. The results are GP-reviewed.

Table of contents:

Heading 2

Challenges

Thriva sought our expertise in React Native development, app redesign, and developer training. The goal was to elevate Thriva's healthcare app, streamline the development pipeline, and enhance the capabilities of their in-house development team. In short, Thriva partnered with us to help them remarkably improve their mobile health app.

Work done

Thriva's application was initially built with Expo CLI and leveraged Expo's libraries. The challenge at hand included maintaining up-to-date dependencies, ensuring the smooth operation of Expo-related features (e.g., app building and release), and incorporating new features as they emerged. The release process was primarily manual, involving command-line building and manual Expo dashboard uploads.

Callstack engineers took a proactive approach to address these challenges. We cooperated with the Thriva team as a staff augmentation partner. Our developer, Adam Trzciński worked with our client’s development team as a senior developer and React Native mentor.

We helped Thriva in the following:

Managing dependencies, including Expo, react-native packages, and their associated dependencies, for each new release
Implementing custom GitHub Actions to automate the release process, including the creation of a QA Staging release for internal testing and the production release for the App Store and Google Play
Providing extensive training to Thriva's React Native team through pair-programming, code reviews, and workshops covering performance optimization and native code development.

thriva mobile healthcare app welcome screen and article

Solutions & Results

Thriva's application is now in exceptional condition as the collaborative efforts between Thriva and Callstack led to transformative solutions.

Thriva's healthcare mobile app now boasts:

A robust architecture with professional maintenance practices and a continuous flow of feature updates
A high level of code coverage, featuring quality-compliant unit and integration tests
Implementation of a comprehensive testing strategy, including the integration of end-to-end testing
Faster time-to-market and added automation around the mobile process to further speed up development and mobile releases
Implementation of new PoC features into the app such as biometrics and integration with a mobile health kit.

Last but not least, Thriva's development team has significantly advanced their knowledge in React and React Native as a result of our collaboration.

Latest React Native upgrade

As per the recent Android SDK API requirements, your app must run on the upgraded React Native version (at least 0.70). Otherwise, Google Play will block a release process when you publish a new app or an app update.

The Thriva team encountered challenges during the React Native version upgrade, prompting their collaboration with Callstack for expert support. The initial state of the app was based on RN 0.70.5 and Expo 48, and the plan was to move to React Native 0.72.4 and Expo 49.

The process included:

Upgrading required dependencies
Fixing build problems and runtime crashes
Conducting exploratory tests
Final verification and post-testing fixes

It was a seamless switch to the new React Native version, and we carried it out holistically. We upgraded all the dependencies, libraries, and any packages that could be incompatible with new React Native.

Also, we shared a lot of recommendations for onward development improvements. The recommendations lay out the next steps for enhancing the Thriva project, shaping its codebase and boosting overall quality.