9D: Wellness app for meditation

A story about how we were involved in the creation of the 9D mobile application in the wellness category, which helps users to train their awareness and take care of their mental health through meditation and breathing exercises.

Our friends from Humandone studio offered to work on the project. Their team was responsible for the design and user flow of the application and they turned to us as experienced developers with a large React Native portfolio. Together we got a cool synergy and a very nice project (you will see it now).

Our team tasks were:

• Create a convenient catalogue of audio recordings for self-meditation with flexible search filters;
• Organise offline breathing practice classes;
• Add personalisation to improve the user experience.

If you have an idea but don't have a technical team or a specialist with the right stack, we're always ready to help.

9D app provides two types of accounts:

All active sessions from instructors are collected in the Facilitators section. They are all categorised by filters. The user can use the geolocation search to make an appointment with the nearest available facilitator. The instructor's card contains his/her photo, a description of the practice, the cost of participation and the number of available spots. After requesting an appointment, the user receives an email with booking confirmation and further instructions.

A catalogue of audio meditation recordings. The user needs to address their emotional state and select a track using the appropriate filters - to recover from injury, combat stress and insomnia, improve concentration and increase productivity. Advanced search settings are also available, with a choice of meditation goal, voice language and even the gender of the instructor.

Users can also find a facilitator or meditation by filtering by duration, language, popularity, and more.

In the MVP version, onboarding was replaced with a questionnaire where users answered questions about their stress levels and main goals for practicing meditation.

In the new release, we’ve replaced this with a short welcome video that introduces the 9D project and its core values.

As part of the new release, we also introduced a referral program to help grow the user base. We used Branch.io to generate unique referral links. Users can share these links to invite friends to register and receive a bonus from the 9D team – a free trial period.

Branch.io also provides full analytics on link clicks and app downloads, making it easy to measure the Affiliate Program performance.

This section of the admin panel allows 9D administrators to manage the list of notifications that users receive. Some notifications are sent automatically, such as session confirmations or reminders for upcoming practices. Custom notifications are also supported and can be triggered for app updates, events or promotions. Recipient groups are selected manually: you can send push notifications to all users, to moderators only, or to a custom list of users.

The 9D app uses a dual monetization model. On the one hand, users purchase paid subscriptions directly through the App Store. On the other, facilitators pay for access to the app and the ability to create sessions through integration with the Stripe payment platform.

In addition, we have built a feature in the admin panel that allows special offers to be displayed as pop-up messages informing users of discounted subscription options. These messages are sent manually. For example, if a user ignores an offer once, they can be reminded later.

Frontend: React, React Native

Backend: Laravel, Horizon

Databases: PostgreSQL + PostGIS, Redis, MinIO

Server: Docker, Nginx

Libraries and services: Google Sign-in + Purchase, Apple Sign-in + Purchase, Scribe, FCM, Mailgun, Imgproxy

We also used Reanimated 3 to animate the images with the parallax effect as they scroll down the Journeys and Facilitators pages.

With the 9D app, users get:

• A handy tool for listening to meditations and building their own library of audio recordings.
• An aggregator with offline class registration and personalised features.

With simple functionality and logical navigation, it creates a convenient ecosystem for working with emotions and has every chance of becoming a true digital community for anyone interested in their mental health.