Web and mobile transformation for a leading health and fitness brand

The challenge

Legacy infrastructure blocking growth potential

A well-known health and fitness app, MyFitnessPal, faced a critical juncture, marked by three main challenges: the revenue bottleneck, the legacy system’s limited scalability and remote collaboration complexity. Although each of these three pain points required a targeted solution, they all stemmed from the same underlying business needs: optimizing the internal development pipeline and standardizing the processes for selecting and displaying ads. Building on these foundations, improving the user experience, particularly the ease of searching for food and nutrition information, was equally critical. Beyond these priorities, MyFitnessPal experienced the challenge of attracting new customers during the COVID-19 pandemic and optimizing server costs while stabilizing horizontal scaling of the system and services.  

The most pressing issue was legacy infrastructure at the core since it had become increasingly difficult to maintain and scale. As a result, MyFitnessPal was advised to improve the platform’s code health, automate the process of deployment with Kubernetes & Flux. Also, MyFitnessPal implemented user permission controls for data processing to make the app GDPR and CCPA compliant. With this foundation in place and with support from Solvd, they could then focus on developing revenue-related features and growing media revenue through yield optimization and product scalability.  

The approach

Comprehensive platform overhaul for scalable operations

As MyFitnessPal faced a variety of challenges, they followed a multistage implementation strategy that included the following steps:  

Swift migration

Despite the existing app being initially created with Objective-C, MyFitnessPal needed to implement new features using Swift. The company resolved incompatibilities and refactored legacy code sections and successfully migrated to Swift while switching to MVVM.  

Storybook integration

One of the challenges MyFitnessPal also endeavored to address was the slow interaction between graphic designers and developers. It was solved by integrating Storybook, which later expanded and became relevant for other products within the same brand. 

Admin panel implementation 

As the MyFitnessPal team was unsatisfied with the long and expensive procedure, which required the input of both managers and developers, they implemented a new tool to simplify and speed up the old way of modifying public ads files. MyFitnessPal introduced an admin panel for ad specialists without code knowledge that allowed them to instantly modify public ad files without having to involve the developers. 

The outcome

New features, new premium users, new revenue horizons

MyFitnessPal’s collaboration with Solvd was based on the “Game Plan” concept, which included an in-depth discussion and evaluation of the current and planned features before embarking on the implementation stage. It allowed teams to achieve mutual understanding and actively resolve problems in the early development stage. Their “Context- message-options” request composition approach made it much easier to avoid the frustrating “ping-pong” communication model and reduced time delays.  

Within a year, the MyFitnessPal brand became an undeniable force in a fierce fitness app battleground. They successfully implemented onboarding screens, native upsell screens, price tests, along with many other features, which led to a rapid and steady increase in trial subscriptions and, as a result, premium users. They achieved ad efficiency by implementing a 30-second refresh rate for each impression, which delivered substantial revenue growth.

One of the challenges MyFitnessPal also endeavored to address was the slow interaction between graphic designers and developers. It was solved by integrating Storybook, which later expanded and became relevant for other products within the same brand. 

As the MyFitnessPal team was unsatisfied with the long and expensive procedure, which required the input of both managers and developers, they implemented a new tool to simplify and speed up the old way of modifying public ads files. MyFitnessPal introduced an admin panel for ad specialists without code knowledge that allowed them to instantly modify public ad files without having to involve the developers. 

We really appreciated the opportunity to work with a partner that helped us to get up to speed very quickly and allowed us to continue to grow our team for the long-term. It seemed very clear that our cooperation was less about billable hours and more about outcomes and results. Culturewise, I find them to be fantastic. There is really a lot of like mindedness, delivering for the customers and for the users, and getting things done. I definitely appreciated working with Solvd and look forward to continuing our partnership in the future

Chris Peters  Vice President of Product Engineering at MyFitnessPal 

Technologies and partners

Tools used

Swift

Java

SQLite

Kotlin

React

Objective-c

Ember.js

Ruby

Storybook

Flux

AWS (Redshift)

Docker

MySQL

PostgresSQL

Fastlane

Bitrise

Kubernetes

Jenkins