Upvrd

Engineering Stability: A Three-Phase Technical Overhaul

Digital Products & Software

Client Overview

Upvrd is an ambitious self-growth platform designed to guide users through a gamified universe of personal and professional development. The app delivers a deeply personalized experience where users embark on narrative-driven “journeys” and test their knowledge through a multi-layered challenge system.

Its sophisticated architecture was built on three core pillars:

A Personalized User Journey: An immersive, story-driven experience guiding users through “Life Worlds” and “Masteries” based on a detailed onboarding assessment.
An Intricate Gamified Economy: A system driven by three in-app currencies (Wisdom, Compassion, Energy) earned and spent through a complex set of rules.
A Sophisticated Recommendation Engine: A rules-based engine designed to personalize a vast content library and ensure content novelty.

The Challenge

While the vision for Upvrd was ambitious, its initial launch was plagued by systemic instability that paralyzed the application and created a deeply fractured user experience. The platform’s potential was locked behind critical technical failures.

Critical Functional Failures:

179+ Documented Bugs: Core user flows were completely broken, preventing user acquisition and engagement. The entire OTP verification flow was non-functional, blocking all new sign-ups.
Core Feature Paralysis: Key features like global search, user profile management, and “My Highlights” were inoperable, failing to return results or save user data.
Data Integrity Failures: The app failed to track user progress or update coin balances in real-time, eroding trust in the core gamification system.

Crippling Performance Bottlenecks:

~55-Second API Response: A key API for fetching data had an average response time of 54.8 seconds, causing the app to freeze and become unresponsive.
90% API Error Rate: The core recommendation engine API had a 90% error rate, making the personalized homepage completely unreliable.

The Solution: A Strategic Three-Phase Overhaul

Auriga IT deployed a methodical recovery strategy to address the root causes of instability and transform Upvrd into a market-ready application.

Phase 1: Triage and Stabilization

Our team immediately tackled the platform’s critical failures, systematically eliminating the 179+ bug backlog by repairing the authentication flow, restoring core user features, and patching broken APIs to stabilize the entire user journey.

Phase 2: Performance Re-architecture

With baseline stability restored, we re-architected the most inefficient backend services. We implemented API pagination and database query optimization to fix the 55-second response time. We also fortified the recommendation engine with robust error handling and fallback mechanisms, ensuring it would always return content instead of crashing..

Phase 3: Process Refinement

With baseline stability restored, we re-architected the most inefficient backend services. We implemented API pagination and database query optimization to fix the 55-second response time. We also fortified the recommendation engine with robust error handling and fallback mechanisms, ensuring it would always return content instead of crashing.

The Impact: From Technical Rescue to Market-Ready Product

The strategic intervention produced a complete turnaround, transforming the unstable application into a high-performance, commercially viable product. The results were dramatic and measurable.