Nomad Travel Co. came to us with a problem: their users were booking trips through a clunky mobile website and abandoning mid-flow. They needed a native-feeling app that handled bookings, itineraries, offline maps and community reviews — and they needed it on both iOS and Android simultaneously.
We built it in React Native over 14 weeks — from a blank Figma file to App Store and Play Store live — and it now has over 40,000 active users with a 4.8-star rating across both platforms.
The existing mobile web experience had a 68% bounce rate on the booking flow. Users were entering card details on a slow, non-native interface that failed frequently on poor connections — a dealbreaker for a travel app whose users are often abroad with limited data.
Nomad also needed offline functionality. Their core users — multi-week backpackers — needed access to itineraries and maps in areas with no signal. The app had to work seamlessly both online and off.
We started with a three-day discovery sprint — interviewing users, auditing the existing web flow and mapping every drop-off point. From that we produced a prioritised feature list and a single-page technical architecture document that Nomad signed off on before we opened Figma.
The app was built in React Native with Expo — giving us a single codebase for both platforms while maintaining a genuinely native feel. We implemented local-first data sync using SQLite so every key user action (itinerary edits, map downloads, saved destinations) worked offline and synced automatically on reconnection.
"Anayat delivered exactly what they promised, on time and within budget. The app has genuinely changed how our customers travel with us."
The app launched on schedule after 14 weeks of development. Within 90 days it had 40,000 active users, a 4.8-star rating on both stores and a 230% increase in mobile bookings compared to the previous mobile web baseline.
The offline-first architecture proved especially valuable — support tickets related to booking failures dropped by 84% in the first month. The internal team took over content and campaign management using the admin CMS we built alongside the app, reducing their operational dependence on external developers.