...
Get a Quote ❯

Case Study | Riyadh Season

Powering Saudi Arabia’s Largest Entertainment Season

A mission-critical mobile platform engineered to support national-scale events, peak traffic loads and seamless visitor experiences.

5 min read

Share

Riyadh Season is one of the largest entertainment initiatives in the Middle East, attracting millions of residents and international visitors each year. The National Events Center required a next generation mobile platform capable of supporting the scale, pace and operational demands of the program. The objective was to deliver a unified digital experience that enabled visitors to explore events, purchase tickets, navigate venues and access real time updates across multiple zones and attractions.

The previous digital experience was not equipped to manage high traffic surges, multilingual needs, integrated payment flows or the volume of content generated during the season. The National Events Center partnered with AppStudio to design, engineer and deploy a platform that operated reliably at national scale while maintaining a consistent and intuitive user experience.

The Engineering Impact

Built for National Scale. Proven Under Peak Pressure.

Speak with Our Engineering Team

1 million +

Downloads during the season

80K

Concurrent daily active users for multiple weeks

$5M

In processed revenue

The Challenge

  • 1. Extreme Peak-Load Scalability
  • The platform needed to withstand massive real time surges in user traffic during Riyadh Season without performance degradation. The previous system collapsed under pressure, risking outages during critical moments.
  • 2. Frictionless High-Volume Ticketing
  • Millions of booking attempts required a seamless, failure-proof ticketing flow. Any latency, drop-off or payment retry could translate directly into revenue loss and public dissatisfaction.
  • 3. Multilingual Experience at Scale
  • The app had to deliver consistent, instant content switching across Arabic and English. Maintaining parity, accuracy and UX quality across languages was a major operational and technical challenge.
  • 4. Complex Merchant and Payment Integrations
  • Dozens of payment gateways, vendors and event partners needed to sync flawlessly with the platform. Legacy integration paths created bottlenecks that slowed down transaction processing and data accuracy.
  • 5. Real Time On-Ground Intelligence
  • The client required live venue data, crowd information and event updates streamed instantly to users. Prior systems lacked the infrastructure to capture, process and deliver real time insights to millions simultaneously.

The Objective

  • Unified Digital Experience for a Global Audience
  • Frictionless Ticketing and Event Access
  • High Concurrency Support During Peak Demand
  • Immersive, Brand-Aligned User Experience
  • Multilingual Engagement Across Diverse Audiences

The Solution

A High-Performance, National-Scale Digital Platform Built for Peak Load, Reliability and Immersive User Experience

To deliver a platform capable of supporting one of the world’s largest government entertainment events, our team engineered a fully native, high-scalability mobile ecosystem that addressed every dimension of performance, concurrency and user experience. The solution combined resilient cloud architecture, highly optimized APIs, native mobile engineering and real-time operational intelligence to ensure uninterrupted service during extreme traffic surges.

1. High-Scalability Native Mobile Applications

  • We developed fully native applications for iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin) to guarantee optimal rendering performance, responsiveness and stability. Native engineering allowed us to maximize frame rates, optimize memory management and support advanced features such as AR, location intelligence and high-volume push notifications. The result was a fast, fluid experience even during heavy transactional activity.

2. Cloud Architecture Designed for Extreme Concurrency

  • The backend was built on Node.js, orchestrated across AWS cloud infrastructure with a high-availability configuration. We designed a horizontally scalable environment using AWS Auto Scaling Groups, Elastic Load Balancers, DynamoDB for NoSQL workloads and RDS for transactional consistency. This architecture ensured the platform could support nearly eighty thousand concurrent daily active users without degradation in performance.
  • We implemented advanced caching layers, optimized cold-start behaviour and minimized API surface area to achieve sub-second response times during peak usage.

3. End-to-End Ticketing and Payment Orchestration

  • Given the mission-critical nature of ticket sales, we engineered a multi-gateway payment integration layer supporting high-throughput checkout sessions with full redundancy. Our payment orchestration system included:
    • Failover logic across gateways
    • Optimized checkout APIs to reduce transaction latency
    • Secure session handling for peak-time ticketing races
    • Safeguards for duplicate or dropped transactions
    This ensured uninterrupted revenue flow and a frictionless purchase experience even at maximum load.

4. Location-Based Discovery and Real-Time Operational Visibility

  • The app included a location-aware discovery engine powered by mapping and geolocation services, which allowed users to explore venues, attractions and events dynamically. Real-time updates on crowd conditions, event schedules, operational changes and venue alerts were delivered through optimized push channels and intelligent API refresh intervals.
    This created a responsive, situationally aware digital companion for millions of residents and tourists.

5. Immersive AR Components for On-Ground Engagement

  • Using advanced AR toolkits, we introduced interactive features that elevated the physical experience of Riyadh Season. Visitors could engage with on-ground installations, interactive displays and immersive elements that blended digital content with real-world environments. These features increased dwell time, engagement and shareability.

6. Multilingual Experience Engine

  • We built a seamless Arabic and English bilingual engine that allowed instant switching without reloads or performance delays. The design system accounted for right-to-left layouts, dynamic string resizing, accessibility requirements and brand coherence across both languages.

7. Data and Behaviour Intelligence Layer

  • To support continuous optimization, we integrated an advanced analytics and behaviour-tracking module that captured detailed user flows, event interaction patterns, conversion insights and load performance. This informed recommendation algorithms, operational decision-making and post-event reviews.

8. Delivered in a Compressed Government Timeline

  • The entire solution was executed within ninety days, meeting an aggressive government timeline without compromising architectural integrity, security posture or scalability benchmarks. This required precise planning, a parallelized development process and a rigorous governance model overseen by:
    • Product Owner
    • Solution Architect
    • Native Mobile Engineers
    • Backend Developers
    • QA Engineering Team
    • DevOps Engineer
    • UI and UX Designers
    • Project Manager

The Impact

  • Market-scale adoption during peak season: Surpassed one million total downloads, establishing Riyadh Season as one of the most widely adopted public entertainment apps in the region.
  • Enterprise-level concurrency at national scale: Sustained eighty thousand concurrent daily active users for nearly a month, validating the stability of the AWS high availability architecture and backend tuning.
  • Significant revenue throughput with zero interruption: Processed five million dollars in transactions for ticketing, experiences and bookings with uninterrupted payment flows, even during traffic surges.
  • Strong uplift in digital visibility and public engagement: Achieved a fifteen point rise in App Store ranking within the entertainment category supported by higher session durations and deeper in-app engagement.
  • Consistent post-launch performance improvements: Delivered measurable gains including faster launch times, reduced crash rates, improved event discovery, optimized multilingual flows, and smoother checkouts through payment API refinements.

Share

Why Leading Enterprises Choose Zazz

A trusted engineering partner delivering resilient, scalable and mission-critical digital platforms for high-visibility, high-traffic environments.

Let’s Talk Engineering

Scaling Application Development Through Dedicated Resources for KCTS9

To meet growing mobile demand, Cascade PBS partnered with Zazz for rapid app development via staff augmentation—ensuring speed, consistency, and flexibility.

Turning Complex Real Estate Workflows into Seamless Mobile Experiences

Zazz partnered with New Western to reimagine their digital product-from fragmented web flows to a mobile-first experience backed by full-stack support.

Empowering Future Talent in Trades and Technology

Commissioned by the Government of Ontario, this platform fosters next-generation technical talent. We engineered a scalable system to promote skills development and connect youth to rewarding career pathways across trades and emerging technologies.
Scroll to Top