Industry

MOBILE DEVELOPMENT

Location

CANADA

Platform

XAMARIN

Updated the Legacy App to Modern Requirements and Introduced the Dark Mode in the Design for Marketability of the Product.

OneHSN is a large Canadian company that develops software solutions that digitize and modernize human services.

The company's product NetLS company has been working on is a mobile app that does the childcare centers search for Canada, based on their own database of childcare centers that is layered on top of the Google Map. 

The small MVP was developed by a team of developers from the client side. The product was released in Play Market and the App Store with some success. However, three years ago, the company's goals changed and the project was no longer supported. This has led to the fact that the application is outdated both morally and technologically.

A few months ago, the customer again decided to develop the mobile product line and contacted us, changing the concept and requirements for the application.

 

The two main problems needed to be solved by our team were:

1. Outdated version of the application, in particular:

- Much of the functionality that is expected in modern applications was impossible to implement due to the outdated core of the application.

- Due to an update to the App Store and Play Market policy, the app was not subject to the minimum publishing requirements.

- The difficulty of finding documentation for the outdated version and as a result more expensive development and support. 

2. App design was outdated.

 

1. The experts of the NetLS company began to solve the first problem by gradually updating the app to a stable version.

The update took place in 5 stages:

1) Met minimal Google PlayMarket requirements

2) Met minimal App Store requirements 

3) Updated third-party libraries to the latest versions that work with the latest versions of Xamarin libraries respectively

4) Updated to the latest Android and IOS API

5) Updated the Xamarin framework itself to the latest version

 

2. Dealing with the problem with the old design we decided to not only develop and implement a new design for the app, but also to make a good marketing move to follow the latest trends. 

According to a survey carried out by Android Authority with 2,500 Android users, 81.9% use Dark Mode on their phone. Talking about iOS users the proportion is about 83 to 17% (according to a survey carried by medium.com).

Based on this analysis NetLS experts offered the client to develop a Dark Mode to raise the marketability of the product.

After the mode was implemented, we ran Google Analytics for this app, based on user loyalty (number of installs and uninstalls) in terms of versions of the program (before and after dark theme was added).

As a result, we noticed that 55% of Android users and 59% of iOS users started using dark mode, of those who prefer light mode - only 10% and 18% respectively like the old design, which proved our expectations. Even though the percentage of users who switched to dark mode in our app is not as grand as surveys show, it is still obvious that most users prefer dark mode and we think that this number is only going to grow with time. The data we received also proved the necessity of adding dark mode and changing the outdated application design, since 81.85% of Android users and 89.97% of iOS users stayed loyal to the updated version of the application either due to dark mode or updated design.

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On top of that, development using Xamarin cross-platform technology allowed us to avoid unnecessary coding while creating separate applications for iOS and Android. With cross-platform development, code and design elements for one platform are used when working on the other one, and this promises to save time and money.

If we assume that the development of one application takes, conditionally 100 hours, then developing applications for Android and IOS separately would take a total of 200 hours. Xamarin cross platform allows you to create applications close to native for Android and IOS, respectively, in 120-130 hours (saves up to 35-40% of time and resources).

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At this stage, the project has been handed over to the client's development team. To ensure the proper technical coordination of the project, we offered, and the client agreed to keep from our side a technical lead, 1 developer and 1 QA.

TECHNOLOGIES:

Boot Camp students developed a platform for a global UN program

On November 13, 2023, a team of interns from NetLS started working on a project called 2πnk. It is a platform for testing students' knowledge in physics and mathematics. The development was funded by Upshift, a global program of the United Nations Children's Fund.