Skout is a social discovery network that connects people nearby through profiles, chat and location-based features. CodigoDelSur supported its mobile engineering from a 5,000-user MVP through to a platform that reached 300 million users at its peak. MeetMe acquired Skout in 2016 in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $55 million.
Skout's problem was scale, and scale changes what a feature is. Location-based discovery, chat and a push notification on every interaction are ordinary features at five thousand users. At a hundred million they are different problems: every list becomes a feed, every feed becomes a query under load, and it has to feel instant on a mid-range phone on a slow network, which is what most of the user base is actually holding.
CodigoDelSur engineers worked on Skout's native mobile apps across years of the product's growth: location-based user discovery, chat, the push notification layer that drives daily re-engagement, social graph features connected to Facebook, and the monetisation stack with AdMob and Tapjoy. Objective-C on iOS, chosen for control over memory and rendering in an app whose main screen is an infinite grid of images. Stack: Objective-C, CoreLocation, AdMob, Tapjoy, iOS, Android.
Skout grew from a 5,000-user MVP to a platform reaching 300 million users at its peak, and was acquired by MeetMe in 2016 for approximately $55 million. Advertising and virtual currency monetisation were integrated into the core social experience rather than layered over it, across a multi-year engineering relationship on both mobile platforms.
