adsVase Mobile

Overview

A 67-screen Expo app, not a webview in a trench coat: its own reel editor, realtime chat and the AI assistant on board. Mobile is where the platform gets judged, on video-heavy feeds over patchy networks, mid-range phones, and every React Native bridge quirk nobody warns you about.

Architecture, and why

• React Compiler and typed routes, early

  Automatic memoization replaces useMemo ceremony and typed routes turn broken links into compile errors. Both meant refactoring real code.

• Zod at every network boundary

  Strict schemas throw on auth payloads, loose ones log and continue for domain data. Backend drift cannot crash the app.

• Zustand for the client, Query for the server

  Connectivity is bridged into Query's online manager, so a dropped line shows a debounced banner instead of a broken screen.

• Feature-colocated routing

  Every route folder owns its components, hooks and utils, so a feature can be understood or deleted in one move.

• Two backends, one app

  The REST and WebSocket API and the AI microservice each get their own client, so one can evolve without the other.

Engineering highlights

• A reel editor built from scratch

  Draggable text and stickers over video: racing gestures, spring physics and a delete drop-zone, with no commercial SDK.

• Windowed hydration for ranked feeds

  The recommender returns IDs only, so a sliding window hydrates a few at a time and preserves rank order.

• Sockets that don't stampede

  Reconnects use exponential backoff with jitter, so a thousand phones returning online don't arrive as one wave.

• Native quirks, solved for real

  FormData corrupts file-URI uploads, so media goes through the filesystem API, compressed and EXIF-stripped before it leaves.

• Video that behaves

  Reels play off list viewability and respect iOS silent mode, so off-screen video never fights for the speaker.

• Adora AI in your pocket

  Thirteen tones, twelve modes, comment sentiment and auto-reply with a human-handoff threshold. A configurable surface, not a chat box.

Impact

67

screens across the app

63k

lines of TypeScript

0

commercial SDKs in the reel editor