The main goal was to develop an app that creates the same experience as if you are using the website
About client
TheSoul Publishing company is one of the leading global content providers. Being the leading global media content provider TheSoul Publishing company started with brands that our team in Kazan was lucky to help go mobile initially.
The client was looking to develop multiple mobile apps both for iOS and Android platforms that could be technically supported relatively simply in order to update multiple projects with minimum pain and maximum re-use of code across brands.
Challenges
In our desire to help the client develop not only mobile apps but also iOS & Android competencies within the company we faced some interesting challenges:
- Lack of API documentation — as originally there was not much front the back-end was serving.
- Multi-tenant approach in code — where a single repo was to be used across several projects within the client company.
- Mobile development culture — was originally missing in the client company that was both challenging when it was about accepting work yet also an opportunity to develop something very new.
The client was looking to develop apps & gain competency in mobile development.
Solutions
Within a year we’ve accomplished the following to solve some of the most interesting challenges:
- Through the daily Scrum-based agile collaboration of mobile & back-end devs it’s been possible to build strong API requirements and avoid re-engineering the back-end as much as possible. That is the number one risk in such parallel development.
- In this project it was all about two codebases, when developed correctly it was contributing to a handful of projects, which is amazing from the perspective of supporting many codebases otherwise.
- Both for even better collaboration with back-end devs and for setting up the mobile development culture our Android senior dev was working on-site to help the team and the culture grow. Such integration helped waive away some questions and concerns of how it’s actually looking from the other side that sometimes isn’t as obvious during the remote world era.
How we did it
Technologies
- Android Architecture Components
- Combine
- DelayedJob
Results
As a result of our engagement with TheSoul Publishing, there was a handful of iOS & Android mobile apps published under the client profiles. And while statistics didn’t boom right away especially during the initial testing of new platforms — it helped the company enter new areas of distribution and get access to a whole new audience.
We also helped our partners build support in-house that also allowed them to continue the exposure of the content of the client and increase the scaling rhythm. We were happy to contribute to such impressive momentum at the key era of the company by bringing code, expertise, and also free time for C-level for even more important company goals.
