Adastra
Turning a rough Base44 prototype into a production-ready astronomy community platform
Adastra is a community platform for astronomers: news and courses aggregated from across the web, crowdfunding for community projects, and a mobile-first experience built for the people who spend their nights looking up. The client came to us with a working Base44 prototype that had been vibe-coded into existence. The foundation was there. The polish, the structure, and the production quality were not. We ran a two-week design sprint, then rebuilt the product directly in Base44, including their native mobile app.
Process Snapshot
A prototype that worked, but not in the way a product needs to
We spent time inside the existing Base44 build before touching anything. The product logic was sound, but the UX had no consistent structure. The two surfaces, a client-facing app and an admin dashboard, had grown independently with different patterns and no shared language. That gap became the brief.
Two weeks. Two surfaces. Every screen in Figma before a single component changed
The design sprint covered both sides of the product: a responsive client app for the astronomy community and a full admin dashboard for platform management. We designed for Base44's native mobile app output from the start, which meant every layout decision accounted for how the product would render on device, not just in a browser.
Browse, learn, and back projects: the three things astronomers come here for
The community feed aggregates news and courses from across the web into a single curated surface. Users can save articles, follow contributors, and back crowdfunded community projects without leaving the app. Every interaction was designed to feel native, not assembled.
From Figma to Base44, production-ready in two weeks
We work in Base44 natively, which means zero handoff friction. The rebuild followed the Figma spec exactly, including Base44's native app feature to deliver the mobile experience the client needed. By the end of week four, both surfaces were live, tested, and in the client's hands.
Shipped to the App Store directly from Base44
Base44's native app export lets you push a fully packaged iOS build with a few clicks, no Xcode setup, no separate build pipeline. The astronomy app shipped to the App Store and Google Play at the end of the engagement, giving the client a live mobile presence on day one.
2 wks
Design sprint
2 wks
Build to launch
2
Product surfaces
