Hey guys!

I finished my first evaluation for Contra Labs and can officially say I’ve now judged AI-generated design work and it was helpful and needed 🤣😭

I got into Contra Labs back in May, and I was genuinely so excited about the idea of using my design judgment to help improve how these systems evaluate creative work.

Actually gassed I finally got to complete one. Can’t wait for more evaluations.

Congrats !

Kutuku | Cross-Platform E-Commerce Mobile App Concept

Built a modern cross-platform e-commerce mobile application with React Native and Expo, featuring seamless shopping, secure authentication, order tracking, and responsive user experiences for iOS and Android.

Project Type: Mobile Application (iOS & Android) Product Concept

Objective: Design and prototype a scalable, modern e-commerce application that simplifies product discovery, shopping, and order management while delivering a fast, intuitive mobile experience across Android and iOS.

Overview

Kutuku is a modern e-commerce mobile application designed to provide customers with a complete shopping experience from discovering products to securely placing orders and tracking deliveries in real time.

The project explores the complete customer journey from onboarding and product discovery to cart management, checkout, and order tracking while focusing on responsive layouts, reusable components, accessibility, and scalable application architecture.

This mobile app serves as a product engineering showcase, highlighting how I approach mobile application architecture, UI implementation, state management, navigation, and backend integration.

The Concept

Many mobile shopping apps become cluttered as new features are added, making navigation confusing and slowing down the shopping experience.

Kutuku explores a cleaner, mobile-first approach that prioritizes:

Simple product discovery

Fast navigation

Clear shopping flows

Consistent visual hierarchy

Scalable architecture

Reusable design patterns

The goal was to design an application that feels intuitive for customers while remaining maintainable for developers.

The Challenge

Building an e-commerce application goes beyond displaying products. Users expect fast navigation, personalized experiences, secure authentication, real-time updates, and a frictionless checkout process.

The challenge was to design an architecture that could support multiple shopping flows including product discovery, store management, cart management, order tracking, and customer profiles while keeping the experience smooth, responsive, and easy to scale.

The application also needed to support offline capabilities, secure local storage, responsive layouts for different mobile device sizes, and reusable components that simplify future feature development.

The Solution

I designed and developed a modular React Native application using Expo that combines modern UI patterns with scalable engineering practices. Rather than treating each screen as an isolated feature, I structured the application around reusable components, shared state management, and consistent navigation to ensure maintainability as the product grows.

The application delivers a complete shopping experience while remaining flexible enough to integrate additional commerce features, payment gateways, and AI-powered recommendations in future releases.

My Role

As the sole mobile engineer, I was responsible for the application's architecture, frontend implementation, and user experience.

My responsibilities included:

Product architecture and feature planning

Cross-platform mobile development with React Native and Expo

UI implementation from Figma designs

Component library development

Navigation architecture with React Navigation

Authentication flow implementation

State management and reusable hooks

Local data persistence using SQLite and Secure Store

Supabase backend integration

Map integration for order tracking

Performance optimization

Responsive layouts for phones and tablets

Core Features

Product Discovery

Browse featured products, categories, recommendations, and collections through a clean shopping experience optimized for mobile users.

Store Profiles

Dedicated storefront pages allow customers to explore merchants, browse their products, and follow favorite stores.

Search Experience

Search products with recent searches, suggestions, filtering, and category organization to help customers quickly discover relevant items.

Shopping Cart & Checkout

Complete cart experience with quantity management, address selection, order summaries, and a streamlined checkout flow.

Order Tracking

Real-time delivery tracking with interactive maps, shipment status, and progress indicators to improve transparency after processing payment and purchase.

Secure Authentication

Account registration, login, verification, and profile management powered by secure authentication and protected application routes.

Technical Highlights

Cross-Platform Architecture

Developed using React Native and Expo SDK 54, allowing a single codebase to power both Android and iOS applications while reducing maintenance costs.

Modern Navigation

Implemented scalable navigation using React Navigation 7, supporting nested navigators, authentication flows, and deep linking.

Secure User Data

Integrated Supabase, Expo Secure Store, and SQLite for secure authentication, local persistence, and offline-ready functionality.

Interactive Maps

Integrated React Native Maps to visualize delivery progress and improve the post-purchase customer experience.

Reusable Component System

Built reusable UI components and shared utilities to ensure design consistency, simplify maintenance, and accelerate future development.

Performance Optimization

Optimized rendering, navigation, asset loading, and local storage to deliver smooth interactions and responsive performance across a wide range of mobile devices.

Outcome

The project showcases best practices in mobile application development, including reusable component architecture, scalable navigation, secure authentication, offline-ready storage, responsive design, and clean code organization.

Its modular foundation makes it easy to extend with additional capabilities such as payment processing, push notifications, wishlists, loyalty programs, AI-powered product recommendations, and live order updates.

whats your opnion about supabase? is it better than firebase?