Shipping a performance-first video feed: How Tendbble built a real-time social app with Expo

Pierre Cangemi, a React Native and TypeScript expert, shares insights from building Tendbble, a media-heavy social video app that competes with major platforms like Instagram and TikTok, with just two frontend developers. Despite initial doubts, the team successfully developed the app to deliver smooth performance on both iOS and Android by enforcing a rule that only one video can play at a time, reducing memory usage, and using tools such as Reanimated and Skia for seamless animations. They also tackled challenges like memory leaks from react-native-vision-camera, adapted performance budgets to different devices, and ensured offline functionality by managing cache persistence and addressing issues with expired media URLs. The experience highlighted the importance of managing native resources, optimizing platform-specific performance, and making strategic decisions beyond the capabilities of existing tools, demonstrating that a small team can create a polished product by leveraging the right technologies and focusing on critical development choices.