The hidden tech problem South African businesses should not ignore
· The South African
As South African companies look to get more value from existing digital investments, the Bio-Oil distributor app shows why maintaining and modernising business-critical technology is becoming as important as launching it.
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A business app can look perfectly fine on the outside while becoming increasingly difficult, risky and expensive to maintain behind the scenes.
Need to pay attention to
It is the less glamorous side of digital transformation, and one more South African businesses may need to pay attention to.
The issue is not always about launching a shiny new app or introducing the latest platform.
Sometimes, the bigger challenge is keeping an existing digital product alive, secure and useful long after launch day has passed.
Bio-Oil, the skincare brand owned by Union Swiss, offers a useful example.
The brand, which recently celebrated its 39th anniversary, is sold across markets around the world and supported by a large distributor network.
To help keep those distributors connected to company updates, marketing activity, product information and performance data, Union Swiss uses a mobile application developed in partnership with Bluegrass Digital.
But the interesting part is not simply that the company has an app. Plenty of businesses do. The more important question is what happens when that app becomes embedded in the way a business actually runs.
When an app becomes business infrastructure
The Bio-Oil distributor app started with a simple idea: create a more modern way to communicate with distributors across 163 countries.
The concept was initially inspired by the familiarity of Instagram, giving distributors a way to access brand content, view updates, and share images and videos of local marketing activity.
In plain English, it gave different markets a way to see what was happening elsewhere and learn from each other.
Over time, the app’s role changed. It moved from being a more open, social-style engagement platform to a structured communication channel, with selected Union Swiss team members publishing updates directly to the wider distributor network.
That shift matters because it shows how digital tools often evolve in real business environments: what starts as a communication tool can become part of daily operations.
And once that happens, the stakes change. If an app is used to share company updates, campaign information, business performance and market activity, it is no longer a “nice-to-have” digital extra. It becomes part of the operating rhythm of the business.
The critical work that keeps digital products alive
Here is where many businesses get caught out: digital products age. Mobile operating systems change, frameworks are updated, security requirements shift, and new devices and media formats create new demands. What worked well five years ago may still function, but it may no longer be easy or safe to improve.
That was one of the risks identified by Dawie Pritchard, Development Team Lead at Bluegrass Digital, when he joined the Bio-Oil project.
According to Pritchard, the issue was not simply a single broken feature. The greater risk was that the platform had become harder and more expensive to evolve.
“The real risk was not one broken feature, but a system that had become expensive to evolve,” he said.
That is a line many South African businesses should sit with, because ageing technology rarely announces itself dramatically.
It often shows up as slower releases, higher maintenance costs, more fragile updates and nervousness every time a change needs to be made.
What had to change behind the scenes
The modernisation work on the Bio-Oil app included a move to Expo’s Continuous Native Generation approach.
For non-developers, that means changing how the app’s underlying mobile code is managed, reducing complexity and making future updates easier to handle. This was not a small tweak.
The work touched more than a hundred native files and required the team to replace or rework major integrations connected to camera functionality, file systems, permissions, splash screens, background tasks, configuration and image tooling.
In other words, the parts of the app most users never see had to be reorganised so the product could keep serving the business.
Bluegrass also continued upgrading React Native, improving automated testing and strengthening release processes.
It may not sound exciting. It is not supposed to.
But this is the kind of work that helps prevent useful digital products from becoming expensive liabilities.
Why performance still matters
The team also focused on the parts of the app that distributors use most often.
The platform’s feed and media functionality sit at the centre of the user experience, with distributors consuming posts, images, videos, company news and marketing information through these areas.
Improving feed rendering, list performance and media playback may not make for a flashy product announcement, but it can have a meaningful impact on the people using the app.
Anyone who has dealt with a slow internal system, clunky app or unreliable portal knows the problem.
If the tool is frustrating, people use it less. If they use it less, the business loses the value it expected to get from the technology in the first place.
The work also included improvements to monitoring and logging, giving the team better visibility into how the app performs and where issues may appear.
Database architecture, cloud infrastructure and security were reviewed and optimised as part of the broader effort to improve maintainability and manage operational costs.
Again, none of this is the kind of work that usually grabs headlines. But it is exactly the kind of work that determines whether a digital product remains useful.
What South African businesses can take from this
For South African companies, the lesson is not that every business needs a global distributor app. The more useful takeaway is simpler: digital products need maintenance strategies, not just launch plans.
Many businesses have invested heavily in websites, apps, portals, ecommerce platforms, customer systems and internal tools.
Some of those platforms now sit at the centre of how teams sell, communicate, report, support customers or manage operations.
But if those platforms are not modernised over time, the cost of change can creep up quietly.
That can leave businesses stuck with systems that still work, but are slow to update, expensive to maintain and difficult to adapt when the market changes.
In a South African context, where many companies are under pressure to do more with tighter budgets, that matters.
The less visible work of modernising, testing, simplifying and securing digital platforms may be one of the more practical ways to protect earlier technology investments.
The real story is not the app
Bio-Oil’s distributor platform is still doing what it was meant to do: helping Union Swiss communicate with distributors across markets and share company, marketing and performance information.
But the broader story is not just about one app or one brand. It is about what happens once digital tools become woven into the way a business operates.
Launch day may get the attention. The real test comes years later, when the platform still needs to work, still needs to adapt, and still needs to support the people relying on it.
For businesses sitting on ageing apps, portals or digital platforms, that may be the uncomfortable question worth asking now: is your technology still helping the business move, or has it quietly become the thing slowing it down?