Deliciously Ella
Deliciously Ella is a UK lifestyle brand with a mobile app full of workouts, recipes, and wellbeing content. But despite the brand’s popularity, the app had been struggling with a rising churn rate.
Over the course of a year, we joined forces to clean up the tech stack, boost speed and stability, and bring users back by making the app experience smoother and more reliable.
2025
Fix the churn and stabilise the app
Deliciously Ella’s mobile app was packed with great content—but also slowed down by bugs, sluggish performance, and unclear pricing.
When we joined the project, the app had over 70,000 active users. Many of them were leaving because the app kept freezing or crashing, and the team needed a fix that was both fast and reliable. Since the brand was preparing to expand to new markets beyond the UK, USA, Germany, and Australia, ensuring a smooth, stable user experience became even more critical.
Our goal was to audit and clean up the tech stack, speed up the app, resolve the most painful bugs, and make sure the app was easy to maintain and scale in the long run.
Fragmented setup without clear ownership
We weren’t alone on this one—three other vendors were working on different parts of the app. That made coordination a challenge, especially when it came to keeping priorities aligned, avoiding overlaps, and making sure we didn’t overwrite or conflict with each other’s work.
Since there was no in-house CTO to lead the tech side, we stepped in with interim CTO support to help drive the process and align everyone involved.
A smoother experience that keeps users coming back
We started with a full tech audit and bug-fixing sprint to stabilise the app. Then came feature upgrades:
Set up CI/CD pipelines
Polished up the UI
Rebuilt recipe ingredient structures (cutting third-party tool costs)
Added nutritional data to recipes
Significantly reduced the app size on iOS
We also cleaned out the iOS codebase from deprecated code services and unused features, which made the app more maintainable. Then we helped streamline how all the vendors worked together and introduced a new quarterly planning cycle, cutting down on meetings and making collaboration smoother.
With the app stable and churn reversed, we moved into a long-term partnership—maintaining the platform and exploring ways to gradually introduce AI-driven features that could boost content quality and personalise the user experience.
"Working with Applifting has been a really positive and welcome change for our app and membership offering. As we don’t have an in-house technical team, it’s crucial for us to have external partners we can rely on—and Applifting have more than delivered.
They’ve been incredible to work with: highly skilled, communicative, collaborative, and always transparent about scope, cost, and timings. The team is also incredibly patient, considering the lack of technical knowledge on our side. We’re now in a much better position to grow with confidence, and we’re excited about what’s ahead."
Matthew Mills
CEO
