Client: Gypsy Circle is a social travel app designed to connect users with friends before they arrive at their destination. Users can enter their travel plans to see which friends are also visiting the same location or who live nearby.
Challenge: Gypsy Circle had launched their mobile app on the App Store, but it was significantly underperforming, jeopardizing user retention and brand reputation. The app suffered from slow performance, frequent crashes, and subpar user experience. The primary issue lay in the complexity of the travel feed algorithm, particularly the Trip Overlaps and Friends Visiting features. These features took 20-30 seconds to process, leading to high CPU and memory usage on the server side. As users with more friends and trips engaged with the app, performance issues became more pronounced, with Trip Overlap times reaching 23 seconds and Friends Visiting taking 15 seconds. The app’s performance risked negative reviews and reduced downloads.
Solution: SSI conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the application and server-side code. SSI redesigned the database architecture to address the algorithmic complexity and migrated the data to a new schema. This required extensive changes to ensure compatibility across the entire application. By optimizing the algorithms, SSI reduced the Trip Overlap Time to just 0.3 seconds and Friends Visiting Time to under 1 second.
SSI rewrote major components of the mobile app, updated data models, and developed new modules to enhance performance, robustness, scalability, and user experience.
Result: The revamped application was relaunched with extensive positive press and marketing. Within the initial weeks, the app experienced a surge in user adoption, demonstrating significant improvements in performance and reliability. User engagement and satisfaction grew substantially, with the app’s enhanced speed and stability contributing to its exponential user base growth.
