Donbitt

React Native app for 'Mapster' travel service

The goal was to create a project that accommodates the complex creation of tours, which can be composed of car rental, accommodation, booking airline tickets, cabs, excursions, transfers on the part of the client. We also created the ability to place all these services on the part of our partners. At the same time, the project contains a global admin panel that covers all of the above functions. The most challenging part was to create the architecture of the project, which consists of 9 different services that unite into one complex system. We had to create the most suitable UI library, create custom components and make many identical services in a short period of time. The original goal was that all these 9 services had to be created within 3 months. They all had to be multi-currency, multi-lingual, with complex pricing systems for different types of goods. In essence, all these services are marketplaces, but with a much more complex and larger functionality for adding goods. On ordinary marketplaces, goods are added and realized according to a certain template. In our case, all these goods are very different from each other and cannot be fitted to a certain template. Currently, there are 2 most popular frameworks for creating cross-platform applications: React Native and Flutter. There was also a choice to create native applications for each mobile OS separately, using the Kotlin and Swift programming languages, but we decided to abandon this idea in favor of cross-platform development, since such development covers all the needs that arose during the creation of the project. In addition, such development takes much less time than native development, which also corresponded to our plans to create an MVP version of the project in 3 months. Then we had to choose between React Native and Flutter, where we initially chose Flutter and implemented the MVP version using it. We then developed and scaled this version, but the optimization of the application deteriorated quite significantly. We conducted our own research, in which we created an identical application using React Native and received a significant increase in the application loading speed from 4 to 10 times, so we continued to develop the application created using React Native. We also noticed that a React Native application takes up much less storage space compared to Flutter. We managed to reduce the size of the application from approximately 250MB to 20MB.