Actively Black Mobile Commerce and Fitness Rewards Platform

Project Overview

The platform brings shopping, movement, rewards, media, and community into one mobile experience. React Native provides the app shell and custom fitness, rewards, media, and community screens. Selected commerce flows use Actively Black’s Shopify storefront through an in-app WebView. A NestJS backend coordinates application data, reward processing, administrative settings, and third-party integrations, while a Next.js dashboard provides approved administrative controls.

Client Background

Actively Black is a Black-owned premium athleisure brand founded by former professional basketball player Lanny Smith. The brand combines performance apparel with a mission to celebrate Black culture, support community initiatives, and strengthen Black ownership within the sportswear industry. As its commerce and community presence expanded, Actively Black set out to create a mobile experience connecting shopping, movement, rewards, culture, and community.

The Challenge

Actively Black wanted to extend its Shopify commerce experience into a mobile platform that could reward users for eligible physical activity. The system needed to manage health-data permissions across iOS and Android, normalize eligible activity data, prevent duplicate reward processing, apply configurable earning rules and limits, synchronize loyalty value with Shopify and Rivo, and support shopping, media, referral, leaderboard, sharing, notification, and administrative workflows.

Product Architecture

The application uses a hybrid architecture. React Native delivers the surrounding navigation and custom mobile features. Shopify WebView pages handle selected product, cart, and checkout experiences. NestJS APIs coordinate application data, reward processing, admin settings, and integrations. The Next.js dashboard gives authorized Actively Black team members control over supported configuration without changing the mobile binary for every content or settings update.

Health-Data Integrations

With the user’s permission, the application reads eligible activity data from Apple HealthKit on iOS and approved Android health sources through the verified integration used by the application. Users can deny or revoke access without losing unrelated shopping functionality.

Reward Processing and Loyalty Synchronization

The backend applies client-configured earning rules and daily limits to eligible activity data. Approved calculations convert qualifying activity into reward value while duplicate-prevention, retry, eligibility, and reconciliation controls help prevent the same activity or loyalty credit from being processed more than once.

Shopify and Rivo Integration

The application reuses Actively Black’s Shopify commerce experience for product browsing, cart, and checkout, while React Native provides the surrounding navigation and custom mobile features. WebView routing and session handling connect the hosted storefront with the application experience.

Approved reward calculations synchronize with Rivo so loyalty value can be used in the Shopify checkout workflow.

Community Features

Beyond commerce and rewards, the application includes community and media experiences built in React Native:

• A fitness leaderboard for comparative activity within the supported ranking rules
• A referral program with deep-link support for inviting others to the app
• Actively Black TV for branded video content stored and delivered with AWS S3 support
• Shareable workout snap cards for selected activity highlights
• OneSignal push notifications for supported transactional and promotional messages

Administrative Controls

A Next.js dashboard gives authorized Actively Black team members control over supported app settings and content. Depending on permissions, administrators can manage navigation, promotions, reward settings, media, notifications, and other approved configuration without changing the mobile binary for every update.

Reliability, Updates, and Security

The application includes loading, error, and retry handling for supported API and synchronization workflows. Eligible activity synchronization can retry after a temporary connection failure while duplicate-prevention controls help avoid issuing the same reward twice.

Where an over-the-air update workflow is active, it supports compatible JavaScript and asset changes between standard store releases. Native-code and incompatible runtime changes continue through the app-store release process. Earlier CodePush work on the project is treated as historical delivery work rather than a current Microsoft App Center dependency.

The application uses authenticated access, operating-system health permissions, and verified transport and storage protections for supported workflows. Broader encryption, retention, deletion, audit, and mobile privacy-policy details are kept to confirmed controls because the product processes health-derived information tied to reward value.