Saddleback Church

Overview

Saddleback Church is one of the largest churches in the United States, with a mobile app used by tens of thousands of members. Over 8+ years we contributed continuously — writing features, fixing bugs, improving architecture, and helping grow the quality culture of the team.

The challenge

A large-scale mobile app serving a non-technical audience demands reliability above all else. The codebase had grown organically over the years — with low test coverage, inconsistent patterns, and increasing technical debt that made every release riskier than it needed to be.

The solution

We embedded with the team long-term, shipping features while systematically improving the codebase underneath them. We introduced testing standards and wrote the foundational test suite, contributed to a major rewrite of the Companion app, and worked closely with backend and QA to raise the overall quality bar.

From 15% to 64% test coverage

When we joined, the app had minimal test coverage. We introduced testing standards, wrote foundational unit tests, and gradually shifted the team's culture toward quality-first shipping — growing coverage from 15% to 64% and reducing regression bugs significantly.

The Companion app rewrite

The Companion app — the primary mobile experience for church members — underwent a significant rewrite. We were active contributors throughout: helping plan the new architecture, writing key modules, and ensuring the migration was stable for a live user base.

Long-term codebase ownership

Eight years on the same codebase gives you a depth that short-term contractors can't match. We understood every corner of the app — the quirks, the history, the trade-offs — and used that knowledge to make every change safer and every feature better.

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