DEVELOPMENT CASE STUDYWINTERFRIEND IOS APP

A story of building a navigation app for snow-

boarders and skiers.

“I really like winter. It is a time for Christmas, presents and, of course winter sports. Main purpose of developing the application was to allow user and his friends to find each other on the resort, or to send an alarm to the friends, when you got injured. Hope it will help people to feel more confident on the hill.”

AleksandrProject Manager

“We often attend misc events, sometimes sponsoring some, in London specifically. Everyone needs apps now and this is where Mobilunity with its literally unlimited access to very skilled and very affordable talent definitely stands of a crowd. This app was a good project to do. Nevertheless I prefer androids :) but android apps are a subject for way different case study.”

Alfonsine WilliamsDirector of Business Development

Any person, who has ever spent a winter vacation at a skiing resort, has encountered the problem of locating friends or relatives, and gathering them all for a common lunch or coffee break. And for larger groups this problem can be even worse. With advancements in mobile technologies connections have become available in almost every corner of the globe, and with this you would assume that the easiest option would be to give your friends a call. This may be true, but what if you are spending your winter vacation abroad? Roaming charges and inconsistent connections could cost you hundreds of dollars and eat into your vacation budget.

Our mobile application development team decided to take on

this challenge and develop a GPS phone tracking app, which

would allow its users to:

The outcome of the project is a new skiing app we call, Winter

Friend, available for iOS which we encourage you to download

on the App Store.

PROBLEM

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Project Team

Project ManagerDesignerBackend DeveloperiOS DeveloperQA Engineer

Easily add contacts of friends

Locate and track your team on slopes

Communicate with friends

Send instant alarms in case of emergency

Avoid spending money on calls

As with any internal project, we started our GPS app development process with initial market research. Our Project manager analyzed popular skiing apps with similar functionality to define the key advantages of the new product and the Top 4 apps were compared using the following criteria:

THE CASE STUDY

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MARKET RESEARCH &BUSINESS ANALYSIS

Criterion Find My Friends! Friends tracker Friend mapperPhone tracker for iPhones

Resort maps

User location

Friends location

Covered distance

Speedometer

Chat

Social streaming

Add locations

Push notifications

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+

+

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+

+

-

+

-

+

+

-

-

-/+ (SMS)

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-

+

-

+

+

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

+

+

-

-

-/+ (SMS)

-

-

+

The analysis showed that the apps currently on the market lack two main features:

1. The ability to communicate directly with friends and send them alarms/alerts

2. A database of detailed resort maps

And these features were fully implemented in our new app.

Once we identified and agreed upon the key advantages of the winter app over its competitors our Project Manager proceeded to writing technical requirements for the mobile application development project. This included defining the milestones for the MVP version of the app. At Mobilunity we use various tools for project planning and tracking, and one of them is Redmine. Here is a screenshot of the project:

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

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Screenshot of Winter Friend project in Redmine

In line with project requirements our team proceeded to develop the design for the sports app using Photoshop. Our designer prepared the wireframes and 13 app screens in total which were required for the following modules:

Additionally we developed a logo for the app, default images for the start and profile screens and a set of icons.

To provide a better user experience we use InvisionApp for all of our design projects, you may review the screens for our app here:

UI/UX DESIGN

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Registration/login through facebook

Friends

Current resort map

List of resorts

Prototypes of Winter Friend app done in PhotoShop

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The process of travel app development was divided into 2 parts: backend and frontend development. With both teams working on Google Maps integration, Facebook authorization and GPS data procession.

The Backend team was tasked at solving a list of issues to allow the app to do the following:

BACKEND APP DEVELOPMENT

Send user profile data to the server including the fields-

birthday, first_name, last_name, photo, & email through

Facebook’s API

Integrate Google Map’s API to receive the maps of the

most popular resorts

Change API to POST parameters list

Collect, store and receive GPS data to be reflected on the

map

Implement the alarm functionality using a custom push

notification library

Our iOS app developers were working on the following functionality:

FRONTEND APP DEVELOPMENT

App authorization through Facebook

Retrieve information on resorts through Google Maps

API

Get information about friends via Facebook API

Send GPS data on current location to the server

Implement friends search in the app

Slice all designs for iPhone ski resort app

Add sound to alarm messages in the app

Optimize the app for lower battery usage

Solving problems with integration of third-party services is not an issue when you hire an iOS app

developer with Mobilunity!

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Once our Objective C application was ready for testing, it was thoroughly reviewed in developer mode by our QA team on Apple devices including iPhone 5, iPhone 6, and the iPhone 6S. The following features were reviewed for bugs:

TESTING &BUGFIX

User registration

User’s friends list

Ability to display user and his friends on Google Map

User profile

Search through friends list

Alarms

Resort list

Web cam/web site

Our marketing team’s task was to promote the new ski app in order to get more app downloads. The team started working according to the following plan:

PROMOTION

Analyze competition and define app keywords

Optimize the AppStore description

Launch a dedicated website for the mobile application

Plan the app’s landing page design

Create the app’s demo video explaining features of the

new application

Find relevant portals dedicated to winter sports and

interested in mentioning new apps in articles

Submit the app for review to specialized websites

11 bugs were reported and fixed in the process of testing, and our ski track app was ready to go over to

testflight on the AppStore. It should be noted here, that in-depth testing is an integral part of the mobile app

development services we provide.

The outcome of this activity was the launch of the new app website, which explains in detail how the app

works and who may benefit from using it.

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GPS app development with Google Maps and Facebook integration has a number of con-straints, which should be taken into consideration. Our MVP mobile app development team has faced and successfully solved several of them:

Friends listAdding friends to your account is one of the common problems, when you want to use a new social app.

That’s why our Objective C developer decided to use facebook’s API for user registration. When a user logs in,

using their facebook account, the app automatically gets a list of friends, who use the application.

MapsCurrently the market provides plenty of map services, so there is no need to create your own. Leaders in the

industry include: Google Maps, Yandex Maps, Apple Maps and Open Street Maps. Some of the services are

free, and others require payment for some of the functionality features. For example, Apple Maps require an

iOS device to use them properly, so it wouldn't be the best solution, if you are looking for cross platform app

development. Yandex Maps are well detailed but only for the former Soviet Union. Open Street Maps is less

detailed so it would not be as useful with an app designed to help you find your friends. After critical analysis

of all existing features, we decided to use Google Maps API.

High battery consumptionGeolocation is a process that, if done incorrectly, can cause a major strain on a device’s battery. To avoid this

issue, our team set the accuracy to 20-30 meters, increased the intervals between requests to the server, and

implemented an algorithm which monitors the customer's location regulating when location data is sent to

the server.

Network loadTo avoid overloading the network with constant downloading of new images, our developers implemented

image caching, and Core Data object graph framework to minimize the Internet consumption after the appli-

cations first launch.

CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS

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https://mobilunity.com sales@mobilunity.com

The new snowboarding app Winter Friend became a mix of Facebook and Google Maps integrations elegantly coded using Objective C as its programming language. The key tech-nologies we used included:

TECHNOLOGIES USED

GPS for location tracking

Facebook API for registration, authorization and friends list

GoogleMapKit based on Google Maps API for resorts map visualization and user geo location definition

Objective-C for iOS app coding

AFNetworking to send the data to the web server

Core Motion and Core Location iOS frameworks to receive and process motion data

FastImageCache iOS library for storing and retrieving images

Core Data iOS framework for image optimization

Google Analytics for Mobile Apps for app analytics

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