Building HiNeighbour: A Community App on Web, iOS and Android

The problem

Residents of large communities rely on crowded group chats to find a plumber, sell a sofa or arrange a meetup. Messages get lost, strangers join, and nobody can tell who is actually a neighbour.

HiNeighbour gives a neighbourhood one private place, open only to residents who have shown they live there.

What we built

• Verified membership: residents prove their address before they can post or message.
• A community feed, meetups with RSVPs and reminders, a marketplace to buy, sell and rent, carpooling, and private groups.
• A directory of local businesses and home help, with reviews from neighbours.
• One to one messaging with photos, and push notifications for replies, likes and RSVPs.
• A weekly email digest, and an admin console protected by two factor sign in.
• Arabic and English on the web.

Technical decisions

• One React Native codebase for iOS and Android, so both apps get the same features in each release.
• Access rules live in the database, not only in the app, so the rules hold whatever client is used.
• Privacy by default: verified residents only, and product analytics that use no cookies.
• Photos are compressed on the device and checked on upload, so the app stays quick on mobile data.
• Separate staging and production environments, with automated API tests running against staging.

Launch and running it

• Submitted, reviewed and published on the App Store and Google Play by our own team, with a log of every build.
• Each store release is tested in rounds on real iPhones and Android phones before it is submitted.
• Day to day running: the weekly digest, scheduled meetup reminders, protection against abuse, and tracking where residents get stuck so we can fix it.

Why it matters for your project

Running our own app keeps us honest. Every finding in our sample report came from HiNeighbour, and the habits it taught us, from release checklists to testing on real devices, go into every client build.