React Native Mobile App for All-Girls Social Network

Project Objective

Keyhole Software developed a cross-platform mobile app using React Native for a popular all-girls social networking site dedicated to the empowerment of young girls and teenagers.

Girl2Girl Wall is a safe, bully-free zone for pre-teen and teen girls to start social networking. The mobile app was built for both Android and iOS platforms using React Native and can be used by tablets or mobile devices.

Application & Client Overview

Miss O and Friends is a life-style socialization brand for tween and teen girls (ages 8-16), which aims to help young girls build self-esteem. The mobile application was built to accompany the web application so that its users could access from phones and tablets rather than just solely by desktop. The mobile application was to be connected to the same database as the web implementation.

Due to the age of users, a key priority kept top-of-mind throughout the development process was to take responsible steps to promote safety.

All posts go through a manual moderation process and are screened by real people before being published.
Screening ensures the content is appropriate for the age group and does not contain hate speech, bullying, swear words, or identifiable information.
The application is 100% compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).
Kids under 13 need parent approval before they can create an account.
Anonymous users, with only username, first name, age, and US State/ Country displayed.

It’s all about girls helping girls—offering their opinions, suggestions, and ideas. Totally by girls, for girls. The application includes sub-groups of interest like Advice, Animals, Books, Cooking, Coping, Dance, Music, Pets, and more.

Application Technology

With React Native, the business logic is written in JavaScript and is executed by the JavaScript engine of the mobile operating system’s web browser. Not only is there one primary codebase for both Android and iOS, but a significant portion — if not all — of the business logic can be shared between the applications for both operating systems. React Native provides access to all of the UI widgets and controls of Android and iOS, as well as the ability to access all of the APIs of both operating systems. It also allows the use of third-party and custom widgets, UI widgets, and third-party code libraries.

React Native was selected for the project due to its use of JavaScript as a shared codebase, reducing development costs and overall time to market.

The ReST API specification was written using Swagger/OpenAPI. The development server implementation was in Restify. Restify randomized initial model data and wrote scripts that quickly brought up and tore-down the backing MongoDB with Mongoose.

Restify is a Node.js web service framework optimized for building semantically correct RESTful web services ready for production use at scale.
MongoDB is NoSQL cross-platform document-oriented database program.
Mongoose is an Object Data Modeling (ODM) library for MongoDB and Node.js that manages relationships between data and provides schema validation. It is used to translate between objects in code and the representation of those objects in MongoDB.

The application was deployed on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in 2017. This project was developed in conjunction with Pinsight Media, a Kansas City mobile data and advertising company formerly wholly owned by Sprint and acquired by InMobi in 2018.