Case Study · Social · iOS & Android
Game nights get more fun
Play the world's favorite games on group video — face-to-face, online, at unlimited scale.
Pop.In is a virtual meetup space where people anywhere play together on live video. Silicon Prime rebuilt it native — taking game rooms from 5 to 1,000+ concurrent players.
1,000+ per room
Scale from 5 to unlimited concurrent players in one room.
Live group video
Face-to-face play with friends, anywhere.
Native iOS & Android
Purpose-built for smooth video and gameplay.
The Client
A meetup space where the world plays together.
Pop.In is a virtual meetup space where friends anywhere play together on live video — the only app that combines real-time group video with actual gameplay, at unlimited scale.
The Challenge
Add games and scale massively — on a framework that couldn't.
Pop.In had found early success as a video-chat app. To win a competitive edge, the founders wanted to add games and dramatically increase capacity as soon as possible, while elevating streaming quality and UX.
The catch: the app ran on React Native — a decent start, but limited and inflexible to scale — and the team wanted to keep its original back-end while still hitting every business goal.
The Process
We went native — and rebuilt for scale on the existing back-end.
Chosen as Pop.In's technical partner, Silicon Prime switched from React Native to native iOS and Android for far more latitude in features, support, and maintenance — building brand-new apps on the existing back-end, planned carefully for a seamless transition.
Shared game logic
For each launch we defined a strategy for the logic shared between new and current games — so every title ships faster.
Game flows & hosting
Intuitive game flows, in-room chat, and host-a-game features that make starting a night effortless.
AI & crypto rewards
New player incentives powered by emerging AI and cryptocurrency to keep rooms full and competitive.
Adaptive streaming
The right resolution per game layout — changeable per game with no app update — so interfaces look great on every device.
Go fully native — and scale game rooms from 5 to 1,000+ players on the existing back-end.
Approach & Lessons
Leaving React Native was the easy call. Keeping the back-end wasn't.
Going native gave us the latitude to push live video and gameplay far past what the cross-platform layer allowed — the performance ceiling is exactly where a 5-to-1,000-player room lives. The harder, less obvious decision was keeping the founders' original back-end. The tempting alternative — a clean-sheet rewrite of everything at once — reads well on a slide but doubles the surface area of things that can break during the switch. Rebuilding only the client and treating the existing back-end as a fixed contract kept the transition seamless and the risk contained.
A 20,000% jump in room capacity isn't a bigger version of the old app — past a certain point it's a different problem. What breaks at 1,000 concurrent players on live video isn't the game logic; it's everything around it: stream negotiation, per-device layout, and keeping rooms full enough to feel alive. That's why the wins that actually held were the unglamorous ones — shared game logic so titles ship consistently, and resolution tuned per game with no app update required. Being able to change how a game looks without shipping a new binary is what let the platform keep adapting after launch.
Going native carries a standing cost the React Native version didn't: two codebases to build, support, and maintain instead of one. For a product whose edge is real-time video at scale, that price buys the headroom it needs. For an app that never has to leave the cross-platform performance envelope, we'd have kept React Native and spent the budget elsewhere.
Reviewed June 2026 · Silicon Prime has partnered with Pop.In since 2021.
The Impact
A place to play became a destination.
Pop.In is now adopted across genders, locations, and generations — Gen Z, Millennials, and Boomers alike — and hosts TV personalities and celebrities who run games on the platform. It's no longer just a place to play online, but a launchpad for offline meetups and new friendships.
20,000%
Room capacity boost
From 5 to 1,000+ concurrent players in one room.
+80%
App downloads
A jump in installs after the native rebuild.
80%
Smoother streaming
Live video quality improvement across games.
4.7★
On both stores
Rated 4.7+ on the App Store and Google Play.
In their words
Silicon Prime is the strongest dev team with whom we have had the pleasure to work. It’s a team that manages expectations and delivers projects on time and on budget. They excel at communication and deliver the full-stack needs — from project management to QA. Most importantly, they take ownership of their work and engage as full-time team members, never treating their client as a one-off project. I recommend Silicon Prime without reservation, and am happy to provide a direct reference if you’d like to hear more.
Alex Kruglov
Founder, Pop.In
4.7★
App Store rating
+80%
App downloads
Partners since 2021
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