One developer, three platforms, five million users

01 / Challenge

A handful of screens felt web-y in a five-million-user app

Nadia is the entire engineering team behind The StoryGraph, the reading-tracking app that more than five million people use to log what they read and find their next book. One person, one Rails codebase, three platforms in the wild, and all those readers using them every day. Hotwire Native is how she ships product at that scale without a team behind her.

The feedback was clear, though. A handful of screens felt web-y, with transitions that felt abrupt and sheets that pushed onto the stack instead of presenting natively. Nothing broken, but enough small things that the apps didn't feel as native as they could.

Nadia didn't need another developer. She needed a second set of eyes that had seen these specific issues across dozens of apps, and an outside view on which fixes were worth the time.

02 / Approach

An advisory engagement, not another developer

We ran an advisory engagement, not a build. I went through the iOS and Android apps screen by screen, lined them up against the feedback Nadia had collected, and put together a prioritized list of native-feel fixes.

Some were one-line configuration changes. Others were small native components I could sketch out and Nadia could implement in an afternoon. And a few were architectural patterns from 25+ other Hotwire Native apps that the docs don't really cover. We got on calls, walked through each one together, and every fix was scoped so Nadia could ship it herself on her own timeline.

• Full audit of both apps with prioritized findings.
• Mockups and native component sketches for the highest-impact fixes.
• Working calls to walk through each recommendation in context.
• Pattern recognition from 25+ Hotwire Native apps so Nadia could skip trial and error.

03 / Result

A roadmap a one-person team can ship on its own timeline

Nadia walked away with a prioritized list of native-feel fixes, sketches for the highest-impact ones, and a clear sense of which were worth her time. The roadmap is designed to ship in pieces alongside her broader Hotwire Native migration, on her own schedule, without growing the codebase or the team.

Advisory was the right shape because The StoryGraph didn't need someone to take over. It needed someone who'd already seen these issues across other apps, and could point at the smallest set of changes that would matter.