How We Built NestSpace — A Real App from Idea to App Store
The real story of how we built NestSpace — a live rental app on Google Play and App Store — from scratch. What worked, what did not, and what we learned.
In December 2024, we started building NestSpace — a rental and roommate-finding platform for Pune. Today it is live on Google Play and the App Store with real users.
This is the honest story of how we built it — what worked, what did not, and what we learned.
The Problem We Were Solving
Anyone who has looked for a rental room in Pune knows the pain. Brokers charge a month rent as commission. WhatsApp groups are full of fake listings. Platforms like OLX are cluttered. We wanted to build something where property owners could list directly, seekers could search and filter, and there was no middleman.
Technology Choices
Flutter for MVP development for the mobile app — one codebase for both iOS and Android. One developer building everything — Flutter made this possible.
why we chose Firebase for the backend — Firestore for real-time data, Firebase Auth for phone OTP login, FCM for push notifications, Firebase Hosting for the admin panel.
Next.js 14 for the web companion at nestspace.app.
Zego VoIP for voice calling between users without sharing phone numbers.
What We Built
The Flutter app includes phone OTP authentication, three listing types (Vacancy, Flatmate, PG), real-time chat with presence indicators, voice calling via Zego VoIP, Google Maps location picker, photo upload with watermarking, push notifications, deep linking, and force update system.
The web app at nestspace.app includes SEO-optimised locality pages for 26 Pune areas, three-dropdown city/zone/area search, and Firebase Admin SDK integration.
What Was Hard
iOS submission was painful. Apple rejected our first submission. We had to handle APNs certificates, provisioning profiles, App Check, and a deployment target upgrade to iOS 15.
Schema design — getting the Firestore data structure right early matters enormously. We had to refactor our listing schema partway through when we added PG as a third listing type.
What We Learned
Build for one platform first. Get real users early. Firebase free tier is genuinely generous. Watermarking photos matters. Force update is not optional.
When you hire Rooted Tech to build your app, you are hiring people who have been through the full journey — from empty repository to App Store approval to real users.
Want to build something like this? Let us talk at rootedtech.in/contact.
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