2025
Mine: Live Marketplace
A live-shopping app for the UAE: sellers stream, buyers bid, buy and chat in real time.
Client
Pixgen General Trading LLC, UAE
Role
Lead developer, mobile
Dates
May 2025 – now
Stack
ExpoReact NativeTypeScriptAWS IVSStripeTabbyMobXTanStack QueryNext.js
The problem
Live shopping only works if four things run at once on a phone: live video, real-time bidding, chat and checkout. Buyers in the UAE also expect Apple Pay, buy-now-pay-later and cash on delivery. And Expo had no maintained way to use Amazon IVS real-time streaming, so the video layer had to be built natively.
The result
What I did
- 1Started the React Native app from the first commit in June 2025 and led it since. About 93% of its commits are mine.
- 2Wrote the live-video layer as a native Expo module in Swift and Kotlin, with picture-in-picture and a floating mini-player. Then I open-sourced it.
- 3Built real-time auctions, instant buy, giveaways and live chat on AWS IVS and Socket.IO.
- 4Built checkout with Stripe (cards and Apple Pay), Tabby buy-now-pay-later and cash on delivery.
- 5Set up CI/CD with GitHub Actions and EAS Workflows across dev, pre-dev and production builds.
- 6When Apple rejected the app under guideline 5.1.1 (it required sign-in to browse), I built guest browsing. The fix shipped on 17 Dec 2025, and the app went live on the App Store on 18 Dec 2025.
- 7Built mine.shop, the Next.js marketing and share site, with app deep links and share images for live streams.
Building something with live video or payments?
Book a free 30-minute call, or write to arvinrhenm@gmail.com.