Education

Kalaam

A React Native and Firebase Quran vocabulary app that teaches Quranic Arabic through spaced repetition, daily challenges, and leaderboards — grown from 10K to 300K+ users over three years.

App Store Google Play

Overview

Project overview

The build had to combine product clarity, technical reliability, and a release-ready mobile experience.

Kalaam is a cross-platform Quran learning app built with React Native and Firebase. It teaches Quranic Arabic vocabulary through spaced repetition, with daily challenges, streaks, leaderboards, and audio recitation, localized into 80+ languages.

I've been a senior engineer on the core team for three years, owning large parts of the React Native UI and the Firebase Cloud Functions backend.

In that time the app has grown from around 10,000 to more than 300,000 users while holding 4.8★ on the App Store and 4.7★ on Google Play.

Learning, challenge, and leaderboard screens in React Native
Streak and leaderboard logic on Cloud Functions
Firestore modeling for offline progress sync
Release management on both stores
Ongoing performance and stability work at scale

Challenge

What needed to be solved to make the product launch-ready.

Make a large, growing content library — vocabulary, audio recitation, and translations in 80+ languages — feel fast on mid-range Android devices and usable offline.
Keep learner progress, streaks, and leaderboards consistent across devices without expensive Firestore reads on every session.
Keep shipping on iOS and Android while a small team added features to a codebase used by hundreds of thousands of people.
Lay a subscription-ready foundation so premium content could be introduced without a rewrite.

Solution

How the product and engineering decisions were shaped.

Built the spaced repetition, daily challenge, and leaderboard screens in a modular React Native architecture with predictable state flows and memoized list rendering for smooth scrolling on low-end devices.
Wrote Firebase Cloud Functions for streak calculation, leaderboard aggregation, and progress sync so heavy logic runs server-side and the app reads compact, pre-computed documents.
Modeled Firestore collections for per-user progress with local caching, so reading and review flows work offline and reconcile when back online.
Optimized navigation, image and audio caching, and content loading for repeat sessions.
Owned release preparation and store submissions for both platforms, including QA passes and crash monitoring after each release.

Key Features

The capabilities that mattered most in the final build.

Audio recitation with translation support

Bookmarks and reading history

Daily progress tracking

Search and structured browsing

Dark and light reading modes

Subscription-ready content model

Spaced repetition learning engine

Localized into 80+ languages, including Urdu, Bengali, and Tamil

Daily vocabulary and grammar challenges

Leaderboards and social engagement features

Results

Signals that the product foundation was doing its job.

4.8★ on the App Store, 4.7★ on Google Play

App ratings

100,000+ installs on Android

Downloads

Grew from 10K to 300K+ users over 3 years

User growth

Firebase-backed sync across 80+ languages

Technical base

Screens

Placeholder gallery for the main product flows.

These panels can use uploaded product screenshots or simple placeholders while final imagery is still being prepared.

Onboarding welcome screen

Daily lesson dashboard with streaks

Spaced repetition vocabulary card with audio

Weekly leaderboard

Profile and VIP donor support

Related services

Scaling Firebase for Growing Mobile AppsFirebase

Other case study

Mozista case studyEntertainment

Similar Project?

Have a similar project?

If you need a mobile product with clear delivery ownership, I can help shape the build, the backend, and the release path.

Book a Free Strategy Call

Mobile + Firebase

Product strategy, implementation, launch support.

Start the conversation