Lumina was losing contracts because their clients had no visibility into shipments. Competitors offered live tracking. Lumina offered a printed manifest. We had eight weeks to close that gap with a cross-platform app and a WebSocket-powered backend.

The timeline was tight: eight weeks from kickoff to App Store — with a hard deadline tied to a contract renewal. The field drivers used a mix of Android 9 and iOS 14 devices. GPS signal was spotty in warehouses. The backend needed to handle 3,000 concurrent connections from day one.

We used React Native to share 80% of the codebase across platforms and wrote a lightweight Node.js service using Socket.IO for push-based location updates. Offline-first logic cached the last known state locally when signal dropped, then synced silently on reconnect. The client portal used server-sent events for near-instant updates.