Nordic Market Food Delivery App
Performance-optimized iOS customer application for online food delivery, focusing on UI/UX improvements, platform stability, and single-version architecture.
The Challenge
Vertaa Food's iOS app was splintered across three separate code branches — one for each major city market — maintained by different contractors over time. Features released in one city would take weeks to reach others, and bugs introduced in a city-specific branch would sometimes never get fixed. The app was also visibly dated: slow menu load times, an unintuitive reorder flow, and a checkout that dropped sessions on poor connections. Finnish users expected parity with leading delivery apps and Vertaa Food was losing ground despite having strong restaurant partnerships.
Our Solution
We consolidated the three city branches into a single-version Swift codebase with market-specific configuration handled through a feature flag system and dynamic remote config. The UI was redesigned from scratch with a faster menu rendering path using diffable data sources and server-driven layout components, cutting cold-start time significantly. Checkout reliability was improved by implementing an optimistic UI pattern with offline queuing so that orders placed on spotty connections were reliably submitted when connectivity resumed. A/B testing infrastructure was added so the product team could run experiments across markets independently.
Our Approach
Codebase Consolidation
Audited all three branches, cataloged feature divergences, and built a migration plan to merge them into a single codebase. Implemented a remote feature flag system using Firebase Remote Config so market-specific features and pricing rules could be toggled without code changes or separate releases.
Performance Optimization
Profiled the menu loading path and identified redundant API calls and synchronous image decoding as root causes of slow renders. Moved to async image loading with a disk cache, reduced the initial payload by paginating restaurant listings, and implemented view recycling throughout the menu scroll experience.
Checkout Reliability
Replaced the fragile synchronous checkout call with an optimistic UI that shows immediate confirmation and queues the actual API call. Orders placed on poor connections are persisted locally and retried automatically, with transparent status feedback to the user if there's a delay.
UI Redesign & Testing Infrastructure
Redesigned the restaurant listing, menu, and checkout screens. Introduced snapshot and UI tests covering the core order flow. Added an A/B testing framework that lets the product team measure conversion differences between UI variants across different Finnish cities independently.
"For the first time in two years, a feature ships to all three cities on the same day. The codebase being unified was the right call and the performance improvements came with it."
Let's Build Together
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