Shas Illuminated

Shas Illuminated is a study companion for Daf Yomi — the daily, worldwide practice of learning the Talmud one page at a time. It delivers audio and video lectures across Shas, Mishna, and Torah to a global community of learners. GBot took an established but ageing app and rebuilt its foundation for speed and longevity.

Overview

The app had a devoted audience but was held back by years of accumulated complexity. We re-architected it around a clean, modular foundation, rebuilt the core experience, and added capabilities — offline study, cross-content search, and real-time updates — that the old codebase couldn't support.

The Challenge

A loyal daily-study audience depends on the app working every morning, so the modernization had to happen without disrupting the habit. The legacy codebase had grown large and monolithic, making the app slow to start, slow to load content, and increasingly difficult to extend. The goal was to modernize the architecture and the core experience while keeping everything users rely on intact.

What We Built

• Re-architected the app from a roughly 300-file legacy codebase to a clean, modular structure.
• Rebuilt the core browsing and playback experience across Shas, Mishna, and Torah content.
• Offline-first downloads so learners can study without a connection, managed by a resilient download queue.
• Cross-content search across the full library.
• Real-time updates so newly published shiurim appear instantly.

Technical Highlights

• A clean-architecture rewrite — Riverpod, auto_route, Drift, and code generation — replacing the monolithic legacy app.
• Offline-first storage on Drift (SQLite) with a download queue that resumes and recovers stuck downloads.
• Targeted performance work — parallel and asynchronous content and filter loading — to cut startup and load times.
• A background audio service powering uninterrupted audio and video playback of lectures.
• Real-time shiur notifications over Pusher channels.

Outcome & Impact

• Up to 40% faster startup and content loading.
• A modern, modular codebase that is far easier to maintain and extend.
• New capabilities — offline-first study and cross-content search — that weren't feasible on the old foundation.
• The rebuilt app holds a 4.6★ rating on the App Store.