Malabji

Find a pitch, find players, book it, play.

Role: Founder: product, design and full engineering
Year: Since 2025
Discipline: Mobile
Status: Shipped

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The idea

Malabji lets you search nearby football pitches, see available slots, and reserve one. Team search, challenges, and tournaments help players fill the match.

Football pitch bookings in Jordan run through phone calls and WhatsApp. You ask a ground about Thursday, gather players, then find the slot has gone; payment happens in cash on arrival. You also need nine other players.

Malabji handles both. The booking side is a live availability calendar per pitch with instant reservation. The social side lets you look for a team, challenge another one, and run or join a tournament, plus a directory of sports academies.

I founded it and built all of it: the Expo client for both stores, the Supabase backend, the store releases, and the support that follows a real product.

React Native / Expo Router / TypeScript / Supabase / Zustand / React Query / React Hook Form / Zod / Reanimated / Skia / Restyle / In-App Purchases / Deep Linking / Calendars / Push Notifications

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Challenges

Never sell the same hour twice

The challenge

Two people opening the same 7pm slot at the same time is not a rare edge case on a Thursday evening. It is the normal load. Checking availability and then writing the booking is two steps, and anything can happen between them.

The approach

Availability is never trusted from the client. The reservation is a single server-side transaction with a uniqueness constraint on (pitch, time range); the loser of a race gets a clean 'just taken' state and the calendar refreshes under them rather than a failed payment.

In-app purchases on two stores with different rules

The challenge

Apple and Google disagree on receipts, on what a restore means, and on what they will approve. A purchase that succeeds on the device but never reaches the backend is the worst possible bug in a paid product.

The approach

Entitlement is decided on the server from a verified receipt, never from the client's word. The client re-validates on launch and after every restore, so a purchase interrupted mid-flight reconciles itself the next time the app opens.

Calendar and notifications that respect the user

The challenge

A booking is useless if the player forgets it. But asking for calendar and notification permission on first launch, before the app has earned anything, gets both denied.

The approach

Permissions are asked at the moment they pay off. The calendar prompt appears right after a successful booking, not before. Reminders are scheduled locally so they still fire if the device is offline.

Deep links that survive an install

The challenge

Growth happens when someone shares a match invite in a group chat. If the tap opens a store page and the invite is lost after installing, the whole loop breaks.

The approach

Invite links carry their payload through the install, so a new user lands on the actual match after opening the app for the first time, not on a generic home screen.

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