Client: Saffron, a mobile-first dating app.
Saffron came to Black River with a web prototype and a waiting list, and needed real apps in both stores – fast. We built fully native clients: Swift and SwiftUI on iOS, Kotlin and Jetpack Compose on Android, sharing one design system and one API. Every interaction that matters in dating was tuned to feel instant: smooth swipe stacks with pre-fetched, CDN-resized photos, optimistic UI for likes and matches, offline-tolerant chat with typing indicators and read receipts, and rich push notifications that open straight into the right conversation.
Behind the apps sits a horizontally scalable backend: a geo-indexed matching service that ranks nearby profiles by preferences and activity, a WebSocket chat cluster, selfie-based profile verification, automated photo and message moderation, and subscriptions through StoreKit and Google Play Billing with server-side receipt validation. Load testing and autoscaling were built in from day one, so when a viral campaign multiplied sign-ups overnight the platform didn’t blink. Saffron has since passed a million downloads, handling hundreds of millions of swipes and tens of thousands of concurrent chats at peak, with crash-free sessions above 99.8% on both platforms.
Services: iOS Development (Swift) · Android Development (Kotlin) · Real-Time Chat & Push · Scalable Cloud Backend · Subscriptions & In-App Purchases