Coretech partnered with a long-time client to build a native social travel app from the ground up. The goal: let people categorize real-world experiences into shareable Guides so friends and fellow travelers can discover, copy, and personalize those lists for their own trips.
We were asked to create a native social media app that would allow users to categorize their real life experiences and share those experiences in an organized way
Suzie visits Chicago—The Bean, a nearby café, and the Navy Pier Ferris wheel—and saves them into a Guide with brief notes and a cover image. She shares the Guide in-app and to external apps. Later, Laura plans her trip, opens the app, explores Suzie’s Guide, and copies the places she wants into her own Guide, reordering and adding notes so she remembers what to visit. Welcome to the Windy City!
The fun part of a brand-new project is deciding which technology stack and resources to use. At Coretech, we ask ourselves—and our clients—several key questions to guide those choices:
Our team is very comfortable with Django and highly recommends it for a project with significant ongoing development. It has continuous security updates and built in libraries for a lot of features such as sophisticated user management.
Uses SwiftUI and Combine for reactive programming. Enables declarative UI updates tied to user interaction — such as saving a place, liking a guide, or browsing the map. The map feature was emphasized as an important feature and therefore this was a strong motivation for this.
This was a new technology choice for our team at the time. So we understood there would be a bit of a learning curve. However we liked that Kotlin uses Jetpack Compose and Android architecture components like LiveData and ViewModel for managing UI state, local caching, and user interactions. These were all needed features and therefore we were ready to learn.
Renders the core interactive map experience. This app uses custom-styled vector maps with offline tile support, dynamic pin clustering, and smooth transitions for zooming and panning. Mapbox GL JS (for internal tools) and Mapbox SDK (mobile) allow high-performance map rendering and animations.
We are familiar with several Google products and wanted to utilize the metadata that comes with this API.
Now that we had an idea of the technology stack we had to shift gears and decide where all of this awesome code would be served from. Having the right home for your stack is important because not all homes work for everyone.
We frequently suggest Amazon Web services (AWS) hosting out of the box. We have found that it allows the most flexibility for growth no matter where you are running your business from. In this setup we used three main components
We have our requirements, our stack, and our environment – now it’s time to build!
One aspect often overlooked or undervalued by development teams—but essential to a project’s success—is understanding the client’s business. For us, gaining insight into their processes, customers, and market is a cornerstone of building the right solution.
In the social media app’s case, their clients bring expertise across industries such as banking, travel, and sales. We also recognized that, as a new social media platform, the product could quickly go viral or shift direction based on public response. This reality reinforced the decision to host in AWS, giving the flexibility and scalability the app might require.
The social media app team collaborated with an independent designer to wireframe how they envisioned the app’s look, functionality, and flow. Once wireframes were delivered, we aligned priorities around upcoming investor meetings—identifying which features and pages were most critical to demonstrate. Our team focused development on those high-visibility elements first. During the feedback cycle for those features, we tackled secondary but necessary pages, such as onboarding and login. While important, these pages typically aren’t the focal point for investor presentations. This iterative process continued throughout development until the product was ready for public release.
During development, we used TestFlight to manage, test, and review the app with select stakeholders before entering the marketplace. TestFlight gave us controlled distribution, robust feedback, and crash reporting, enabling us to monitor performance and resolve issues early.
Coretechs delivers secure, tailored solutions for government, agencies, and private companies—adapting to each client's unique needs with flexible, U.S.-based development support.
Gil has over 39 years of experience in software development, project management, and business development. He’ll provide an on-the-spot assessment, critical feedback, and determine the level of effort required for your project.
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