Blapp

Context

Blapp is a mobile app for finding and supporting Black-owned businesses across the US — every nearby Black-owned business on a map, plus products and services from Black-owned brands online.

Mandate

The app had gone two years without developmentmargin notetwo years of no commits isn’t a codebase, it’s an archaeological site. — JJ — memory leaks, a crash backlog, and dependencies two years stale. I was hired to bring it back: hunt the leaks, modernize the stack, make it shippable again. The mission deserved an app that worked.

What he built

An inherited React Native and Expo codebase, brought back to health and then run like a product again. The engagement kept widening — from fixing what was broken to deciding what gets built.

• Stabilization at the source. A navigation refactor that eliminated the app’s biggest source of memory leaks, a crash backlog closed out — product filters, denied permissions, back-button navigation, infinite loads — and authentication, login, and onboarding rebuilt end to end.
• The week it went viral. 80,000+ new users arrived in days and the Maps API bill went verticalmargin notethe good news: you went viral. the bad news: you went viral. — JJ — quotas pinned at 100%. Thirteen hours of emergency optimization followed: photo loading moved on-demand, thirty-day location caching, trimmed request payloads, tighter search boundaries — engineered so users never felt a thing.
• Two years of drift, closed. One modernization pass took the app to current — Expo SDK 54, React Native 0.81.5, React 19, Firebase v12 — across 79 files, with deprecated libraries replaced by custom-built compatibility wrappers and years of obsolete patches deleted.margin notefour major upgrades at once: rip every band-aid off, count your fingers after.
• From fixer to fractional CTO. Working alongside the offshore development team became directing it; the person hired to chase leaks became the one setting technical directionmargin notea title is mostly what they call you once you’ve been doing the job a while. — JJ — release decisions, architecture, what ships and when.

Outcome

The viral spike ran up five figures in API costs in three days — an unsustainable pace for a small business. Thirteen hours of optimization cut costs by 90% and duplicate API requests by 70%, with zero loss of functionality. The modernization landed too: four major-version upgrades shipped across 79 files, core functionality tested throughout.

Proof

React Native · Expo SDK 54 · React 19 · Firebase v12 · Google Maps Platform — live at blappapp.com, the App Store, and Google Play.