TheRoom — Mobile

Context

TheRoom is a real-estate community app where owners and tenants negotiate directly. The product brief was simple — make it feel calmer than the existing options on the App Store and respect that most sessions happen on the bus.

What I shipped

• A React Native + Expo app for iOS and Android with shared TypeScript types between mobile and the Node backend.
• A messaging surface with a local outbox, optimistic sends and reconciliation when the connection comes back.
• A push-notification system that defaults to quiet — per-listing toggles, batched digests, and a global kill switch that's never more than two taps away.

What I learned

Mobile rewards restraint. Every animation that takes longer than 200ms gets noticed, every tap that requires precision gets cursed at. I removed roughly half the screens from the first prototype and the app got better with every cut.