How I Built a Full Referral System in React Native in One Day (Deep Links, Stacking Rewards, Push Notifications)

Yesterday I spent 8 hours building something that has nothing to do with my product's core features. No new UI. No bug fix. No optimization. A referral system. I'm building TAMSIV , a voice-powered task manager for Android. Solo dev, 660+ commits, 6 months in. I have 12 alpha testers on the Play Store and I need that number to grow — organically. So I built the full referral loop. Here's how it works, what I learned, and the gotchas you'll hit if you try this in React Native. The concept Simple: every user gets a unique referral code. Share it. When someone signs up with it, both get 1 free month of Pro. And it stacks — 10 referrals = 10 months free, queued one after another. The 3 capture sources (this is where it gets tricky) The hardest part isn't generating codes. It's capturing them reliably across all the ways someone might arrive at your app. 1. Deep links via the website When someone visits tamsiv.com/invite/CODE , Next.js redirects to the Play Store with the referral code embe