Entertainment

Mozista

A React Native and Firebase movie discovery and community app for Android — designed, built, and shipped solo in four months with TMDB-powered catalogs, watchlists, and discussion threads.

Google Play

Overview

Project overview

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

Mozista is a movie discovery and community app I designed, built, and shipped solo in about four months to validate a social product idea for film fans.

It runs on React Native with Firebase (Firestore, Auth, Storage), pulls movie data from the TMDB API, and plays trailers through YouTube.

It's live on Google Play with 1,000+ installs and in open testing while I iterate on engagement features. With no client and no team, it's the clearest example of how I make product, architecture, and release decisions end to end.

Discover feed, watchlists, and curated collections
Moz AI assistant for personalised recommendations
Friends activity and taste-match scoring
Per-movie chat rooms
Solo Play Store release with staged rollout

Challenge

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

Combine a media-heavy movie catalog with social features without the app feeling slow or cluttered on mid-range Android phones.
Model watchlists, profiles, posts, and comments in Firestore so social activity stays cheap to read and simple to secure.
Keep TMDB data fresh and rate-limit-friendly while caching enough for fast repeat browsing.
Ship a complete, store-ready product alone in four months, including design, QA, and Play Store release.

Solution

How the product and engineering decisions were shaped.

Built the app in React Native with a shared feed and detail module pattern, so discovery, collections, and community screens reuse the same list, card, and loading components.
Designed Firestore collections for users, watchlists, posts, and comments with denormalized counters and security rules, keeping every screen to one or two reads.
Added a caching layer in front of the TMDB API with image caching and lazy trailer loading to keep scrolling smooth and API usage low.
Handled Play Store listing, open testing rollout, crash monitoring, and staged releases myself, using the process I apply on client projects.

Key Features