Agiliway Builds a Cordova Ionic App for a Shark of the Aquarium Business

The time has come for quiet waters of the aquarium business to be shaken by the storm of the mobile-first trend blowing over the digital seas in the recent years. A large manufacturer of aquariums, ponds, terrariums and the related products has come to realize the need to solve the issues with its weak mobile application and asked for advice and support.

Agiliway has strong experience in developing mobile applications using native iOS and Android, as well as hybrid technologies like React Native and Cordova. This case has added another unique story to the portfolio of our solutions. To get all the details, keep reading.     

Background 

The company that needed our development services is a leader in the niche of aquarium appliances and sells its products worldwide using retail shops and a website. Although it had a mobile application built on Cordova, the latter abounded with bugs and did not provide a good user experience. The company was fully aware of the new trends and the growing rate of using mobile devices for internet browsing. Thus, to stay competitive and grow its revenues, the company asked Agiliway to improve the usability and performance of the existing mobile solution.   

Project Challenges  

Agiliway experts analyzed the existing solution and found a number of critical errors in the Cordova application:  

• The app had no navigation, so iPhone users could not return to the previous screen and, basically, could not use the app at all; 
• There was no livereload, which made platform-agnostic testing long and troublesome; 
• All imaged loaded simultaneously placing too much burden on the server;  
• Network requests did not handle good and bad responses and the system was not configured to display “no network” notice; 
• Multiple login and interface issues including faulty button’s colors, scrolling and language switching.  

So there was a need to attract our supermen developers to address all the issues.   

Provided Solution  

The development team have compiled the backlog of all primary, as well as minor changes that had to be made to make the application functional. Instead of making cosmetic improvements to the archaic code of the existing solution, we suggested using Cordova Ionic that had some great out-of-the-box features needed for the app and speeding up the development process. In particular:   

• Powerful command line interface (CLI) and livereload that allows to build and test the mobile app on any platform;  
• Ionic deployment system allows updating almost all issues without submitting to app stores;   
• JS and CSS are automatically fetched in the background;  
• Native Scrolling enhances user experience;    
• Multiple UI component library that can be effectively used to create rich functionality. 

Agiliway experts have developed a stable, highly functional and up-to-date solution. What is more, thorough preliminary analysis of viable alternatives and the consequent use of Cordova Ionic helped to make the solution modern and expandable while saving 18% of development time and resources.  

Value Delivered  

The developed Cordova Ionic mobile solution successfully substituted a highly problematic earlier version of the application, and the mobile application usage rate grew dramatically. Nevertheless, the value is not only in responding to the perceived needs and obvious issues, as resolving one issue the company risked spending great resources over and over again trying to make new changes or additions to the platform.  

Our team adopted a wider vision and provided a cost-effective and highly-performing solution that has a proper architecture and will further be easy to maintain and to expand with new features. Therefore, providing great user experience with an app, the company has become several steps closer to their customers, but is has also become ready to quickly respond to new market needs innovating the app anytime.