Cinema chain modernizes legacy apps without disruption

Cinema chain modernizes legacy apps without disruption

A popular American cinema chain partnered with Modus Create to consolidate three legacy codebases (AngularJS, iOS, Android) into a single Ionic React application. Using Ionic Portals and Single SPA, we enabled live, incremental migrations while keeping production stable. Incremental application modernization allowed the cinema chain to maintain business operations while rapidly eliminating technical debt. Now, the cinema chain has a secure product architecture ready to scale with evolving business needs, partnerships, and integrations.

Our work involved

• Technical discovery and proof of concept
• Ionic Portals integration (native mobile)
• Single SPA integration (web)
• Cross-platform React engineering
• DevOps pipeline design guidance

In an era for the entertainment industry where audiences are pulled toward streaming and short-form content, a U.S. cinema chain is bucking the trend. It’s experiencing rapid growth through its curated film selection, immersive viewing experience, and an unabashed love for cinema.

But growth rarely comes without challenges. The company’s aging digital infrastructure was becoming a liability, triggering frequent performance issues and slowing innovation. With three separate codebases (AngularJS for web, native iOS, and native Android), maintenance was costly, and delivering new features became increasingly complex.

The cinema chain knew it had to modernize its legacy apps. It reached out to Modus Create to suggest the right approach and lead the migration.

Challenge

Modernizing legacy infrastructure without disruption

The cinema chain’s web and mobile apps offered a wide variety of features spanning booking, ticketing, and loyalty operations. Due to separate codebases, maintaining feature parity across platforms had become increasingly complex. Every new feature required triple the engineering effort, while legacy frameworks introduced ongoing security and performance risks.

The cinema chain didn’t want to do a traditional “big bang” application modernization. It needed a strategy that allowed operations to continue at full capacity during each phase of modernization while making continuous improvements.

Solution

Phased and zero-downtime application modernization

We partnered with the cinema chain’s IT crew to craft a bold, incremental migration plan. Instead of ripping apart the old product infrastructure all at once, we decided to rebuild the application feature by feature, keeping everything live.

Phase 1: De-risking the project

Incremental migrations tend to be more complex than big bang migrations, where the entire modernized app is launched all at once. Therefore, the Modus team led an extensive technical discovery phase to study all contingencies and reduce potential risks. Together, the team:

• Developed multiple proofs-of-concept using Ionic Portals (for mobile) and Single SPA (for web)
• Demonstrated seamless routing across old and new codebases within live production environments
• Engineered bi-directional data exchange between legacy and modern systems
• Resolved complex issues around shared authentication, token management, and session continuity
• Stabilized DevOps pipelines to support hybrid deployments throughout the transition

The successful proof-of-concept phase gave the cinema chain’s leadership confidence that a zero-downtime, live migration was both technically feasible and operationally safe.

Phase 2: Live incremental migration

The full migration of the legacy system ran across 19 sprints, with the team prioritizing functionality based on business value, user experience impact, and technical dependencies. For example, core product features like ticket booking workflows, showtime, selection, and seat mapping were prioritized over loyalty programs and membership management.

We migrated each feature group to the new Ionic React codebase and deployed it to production while legacy versions remained operational. Using Single SPA and Ionic Portals, the team seamlessly routed customer requests to either legacy or modernized components, depending on migration status, without the users ever noticing it.

Phase 3: Complete consolidation

After achieving full feature parity across platforms, we executed the final phase of the system migration. The team fully decommissioned AngularJS, native iOS, and native Android codebases.

Additionally, we retired all micro-frontend bridging layers (Single SPA, Ionic Portals) and provided guidance for a unified DevOps pipeline for single-codebase builds across web and mobile. This established a future-proof platform architecture to support new feature development.

Impact

A hybrid, secure, and scalable application

Incremental application modernization allowed the cinema chain to operate at full capacity throughout the entire project, maintaining business operations while rapidly eliminating technical debt. The organization now has:

• A fully consolidated single codebase that supports web, iOS, and Android
• Increased development velocity with lower operational overhead
• Reduced maintenance costs by eliminating legacy frameworks
• A secure architecture ready to scale with evolving business needs, partnerships, and integrations