Engineering Pakistan's fastest on-demand delivery ecosystem — from zero to 1M+ orders
A 12-month engagement building four interconnected platforms: customer app, rider app, vendor portal, and live ops dashboard.
Four apps, one real-time backbone, a million orders
Cheetay is Pakistan's on-demand essentials delivery platform. They needed the full ecosystem built simultaneously: customer mobile app, rider app with live GPS, vendor portal for inventory, and an ops dashboard for dispatch.
The complexity: not one app but four interconnected systems working in near real-time. A customer's order state needed to be visible to the rider, vendor, and ops team within milliseconds.
We built a WebSocket-based real-time event system as the backbone. State changes propagate across all four surfaces in under 300ms, giving everyone in the ecosystem a live view of every order at all times.
Customer mobile app
Browse vendors, place orders, live GPS tracking, in-app payments, order history, and ratings. iOS and Android.
Rider app
Order acceptance, turn-by-turn routing, live GPS broadcast, earnings tracker, and availability toggle. Optimised for low-end Android devices on poor connectivity.
Vendor portal
Inventory management, order fulfilment dashboard, earnings reporting, menu builder, and promo tools. Web-based, fully mobile-responsive.
Ops and dispatch dashboard
Live map of all active orders, rider assignment, SLA monitoring, support ticket management, and real-time analytics.
Real-time backbone first, four surfaces second
We started with the event bus and WebSocket infrastructure before writing any app code. Getting the real-time layer right was non-negotiable — every other surface depended on it.
The rider app was purpose-built for low-end Android hardware on 3G connections. We aggressively compressed payloads, batched GPS updates, and used a local state machine to handle intermittent connectivity gracefully.
Load testing to 10K concurrent orders with circuit breakers on every external integration meant the system was production-ready long before the public launch.
Platform architecture (Weeks 1–4)
Microservices with an event bus at the centre. WebSocket server for real-time state. PostgreSQL for transactions, Redis for live state, Google Maps for routing.
App development (Months 2–8)
Customer app (React Native), rider app (React Native, low-end optimised), vendor portal (React web), ops dashboard (React web + live map).
Scale and reliability (Months 9–12)
Load testing to 10K concurrent orders, circuit breakers on integrations, auto-scaling on AWS, 99.5% uptime SLA achieved.
A stack built for real-time at scale
1M+ orders, zero full-system outages
All four platforms went live on the same day. The real-time backbone worked exactly as designed — order state changes propagated across the ecosystem in under 300ms from the first order to the millionth.
The vendor self-service portal meant onboarding was zero-touch — vendors signed up, uploaded their menu, and were live without any manual intervention from the Cheetay team.
FiveNodes built four interconnected products simultaneously and delivered on time. The real-time architecture they designed is what made us competitive from day one — our riders and customers both know exactly what's happening every second.
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