Mobile App Modernization in Action: 90% Fewer Failures for a Leading Restaurant Brand

Business Requirement

A leading quick-serving restaurant brand in the Middle East, renowned for its massive customer base and consistent service excellence, partnered with Railsfactory for a mobile app modernization initiative aimed at strengthening its digital presence.

The brand, operating hundreds of outlets across the region, sought to strengthen its delivery infrastructure to meet growing online demand and ensure smooth, fast, and reliable mobile experiences across both iOS and Android.

The client’s business objectives were clear:

• Enhance mobile app performance and responsiveness across devices

• Ensure a unified, consistent user experience across customer and drive-through applications

• Strengthen backend systems to improve reliability and scalability

• Improve infrastructure observability and application monitoring

• Optimize deployment and maintenance across multiple environments

Ultimately, the goal was to deliver a cross-platform, performance-optimized mobile experience that could scale effortlessly with the brand’s fast-growing customer base.

Challenges Faced by the Client

The client faced several technical and operational challenges affecting user satisfaction and app reliability:

• Slow Startup Times: Mobile apps on both iOS and Android took up to 7 seconds to launch due to large bundle sizes, unoptimized assets, and API response delays.

• Platform Gaps: The drive-through app was Android-only, limiting accessibility and user adoption.

• High Service Failure Rate: Around 5% of service requests failed due to app stability and deployment inconsistencies.

• Slow Query Performance: Backend queries, especially on order listing pages with complex filters, had a 140ms average response time, leading to timeouts on high-load pages.

• Primitive Notification System: Limited push notification functionality impacted customer engagement.

• Monitoring & Deployment Complexity: Fragmented performance monitoring infrastructure and complex multi-platform deployment workflows hindered fast releases.

Railsfactory’s Approach

As a trusted digital transformation partner, Railsfactory brought together a cross-functional team of mobile engineers, backend developers, and DevOps experts to modernize the client’s mobile ecosystem.

The engagement was structured in phases to align with the client’s upcoming product launch goals:

• Requirement Analysis & Roadmap Definition: Evaluated system architecture, performance bottlenecks, and platform-specific issues.

• Technology Upgrade & Process Modernization: Focused on optimizing the Rails backend, enhancing app performance, and ensuring seamless cross-platform delivery.

• DevOps-Driven Infrastructure Optimization: Enhanced infrastructure observability, deployment automation, and monitoring through AWS and Kubernetes.

Solutions Delivered

Cross-Platform App Modernization

We began by modernizing the client’s mobile ecosystem by migrating both the customer and drive-through applications to React Native with Expo. With this move, we streamlined codebase management, simplified maintenance, and accelerated feature delivery, ensuring both apps evolved in sync while reducing development overhead.

Besides, to address slow load times, we implemented advanced performance techniques such as optimized caching, lazy loading, and efficient asset bundling. All these improvements drastically reduced app startup time and provided users with a seamless, responsive experience across platforms, reinforcing the brand’s commitment to digital excellence.

Backend Performance Optimization

While the apps got faster, the team tackled the Rails backend that managed millions of orders. With the scope to optimize multiple bottlenecks, we focused on delivering solutions that combined precision with smart constraints.

• Out of all challenges, the order listing API was the Everest. Handling 60 million records, customers with extensive order histories were hitting timeouts. We optimized it with intelligent filtering that limited query ranges to restricted time intervals, preventing system overload.

• GraphQL integration enabled efficient data fetching and smoother communication between Rails and React Native apps.

• Several new features, including authorization with user scoping, improved security and contextual access control across the application.

• Refactoring and strategic database indexing significantly reduced average query response times.

Seamless Testing & Architectural Improvements

Railsfactory ensured the apps stayed rock-solid and ready for any challenge. By implementing automated testing, real-time error tracking, and smooth deployment workflows into the development process, our team created a system that caught issues early and kept releases seamless across platforms.

Some of the critical enhancements made are,

• Integrated Maestro for automated end-to-end testing

• Implemented Sentry for real-time error and performance monitoring

• Standardized deployment workflows for iOS and Android

• Improved architecture for future scalability and feature expansion

Infrastructure Optimization

Great apps need great foundations. While the mobile apps were being enhanced, our DevOps team reimagined the client’s cloud infrastructure, strengthening monitoring, security, and scalability to support seamless performance and future growth.

To achieve this, we implemented several key improvements:

• Integrated Prometheus–Grafana dashboards, CloudWatch, and Opsgenie for full-stack monitoring

• Hardened security with Kubernetes Pod Security Admission and container policies

• Standardized and upgraded Terraform modules across environments

• Automated load and performance testing with JMeter in Kubernetes using CI/CD

• Optimized auto-scaling and retention policies to reduce infrastructure costs

This unified approach strengthened system reliability, enabling faster issue detection, proactive monitoring, and seamless scalability.

Benefits to the Client

Six months into the engagement, the transformation metrics told a story of their own:

• App startup time: 7 seconds → under 3 seconds (57% faster)

• Service failure rate: 5% → 0.5% (90% reduction)

• Backend query response: 140ms → 40ms (71% faster)

But numbers only tell part of the story.

• Customer support calls dropped.

• App store ratings climbed.

• Order volumes increased as the friction melted away.

• The drive-through app, now available on iOS, opened an entirely new customer segment.

Perhaps most importantly, the development team could finally move fast again. Features that once took weeks to coordinate across platforms, now rolled out in days. The unified codebase meant less code to maintain, fewer bugs to chase, and more time to innovate.

Technologies Used

Rails

React Native (Expo)

GraphQL

Maestro

Sentry

AWS (EKS, CloudWatch, RDS)

Terraform

Grafana

Docker

Kubernetes

JMeter

Business Impact

Enhanced Scalability & Observability: Strengthened infrastructure with proactive monitoring and improved system visibility, enabling faster issue detection and response.

Reduced Operational Overhead: Introduced automated CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows that minimized manual intervention and accelerated release cycles.

Improved App Stability & Engagement: Optimized backend and mobile performance, leading to a smoother user experience and measurable gains in customer retention.

Future-Ready Digital Foundation: Established a scalable architecture that supports continuous innovation, feature expansion, and long-term digital growth.

About Railsfactory

RailsFactory is a global software development company, specializing in modernizing legacy systems, building scalable web and mobile platforms, and enabling digital-first business models. With 18+ years of Ruby on Rails expertise and a team of 350+ full-stack engineers, we serve clients from fast-growing startups to enterprise brands across fintech, renewables, QSR and SaaS.

Whether you’re planning a mobile app modernization, product launch, or a staff-augmentation partnership, we bring end-to-end delivery, deep domain insight and a value-driven mindset.

If you’d like to explore how RailsFactory could accelerate your next digital initiative, feel free to get in touch.

Our client details are protected under strict NDA and cannot be disclosed publicly. However, we’re happy to share relevant references and additional insights upon enquiry.