Skip to content
Back to selected work

Qisara, from idea to both app stores in six months

Full technical ownership of a children's storytelling product: the apps, the backend and the infrastructure they run on.

Context

Qisara creates personalized Islamic bedtime stories for children. A parent sets up a profile with the child’s name, age, interests and language, and the app generates stories around it, with small games that reinforce each story’s lesson. It has no ads and supports more than 19 languages.

I joined DeenLabs as an early member of the startup and led the product technically from the first idea: architecture, implementation, and everything it runs on.

Challenge

The product needed an iOS app, an Android app, a backend and somewhere to run it, and as an early-stage startup we wanted it in families’ hands quickly without lowering the quality bar. With the whole stack in my hands, every technology choice had to answer one question: what lets me move fastest and still trust the result?

Approach

For the apps I chose Flutter. I already knew it well, and one codebase for both platforms roughly halves the work of reaching iOS and Android.

My background is mobile first, so I chose the backend stack with care. I decided to stay in the JavaScript ecosystem and weighed Node.js against Deno. I chose Deno for two reasons: TypeScript is strict and built in rather than bolted on, and its security model is deny-by-default, so the runtime only gets the permissions it is explicitly given. A platform that refuses to do unsafe things by accident is worth a lot when you own the whole system.

Everything runs on a VPS that I set up with Coolify, which kept hosting simple and under our own control.

Qisara system overviewOne Flutter codebase produces the iOS and Android apps. Both talk over HTTPS to an API written in Deno and TypeScript, which runs on a VPS and is deployed with Coolify. Subscriptions are handled through RevenueCat.Flutter, one codebaseiOS appAndroid appHTTPSVPS, deployed with CoolifyAPIDeno + TypeScriptRevenueCat: subscriptions
Fig. 1: the whole system, from the apps to the server.

Inside the app I defined the architecture and built the core features: navigation, localization, payments and persistence.

Outcome

After about six months of focused work, the backend and both apps were finished, and Qisara launched on the App Store and Google Play. It is still online today and has several thousand downloads.