Client

The customer is the U.S. provider of sports, fitness, and wellness solutions.

Project goal

With the spread of the COVID-19 disease, governments imposed partial and complete lockdowns. The United States was the most affected country globally: as of the end of October 2020, it has more than 8.2 million coronavirus cases. As people were not able to go to gyms and fitness centers, delivering remote services became as important than ever.
Partnering with Arateg, the company wanted to move its business online by making a mobile fitness app for home workouts.

Project summary

Project duration

4 months

Team

an iOS developer, Android developer, 2 backend developers, frontend developer, UI/UX designer, quality assurance engineer, project manager.

Technologies

Kotlin, Swift, App Center, Firebase, TypeScript, React, Redux, Redux-Saga, Storybook, Python, Django, Django REST framework, Celery, Docker, Swagger, Bitbucket Pipelines, Stripe API, Apple sign-in, Google sign-in.

Solution

With the view of delivering a great mobile fitness application that would let users workout at home, our team conducted market research and competitor analysis. By defining strong and weak sides of similar products, our experts got a clear understanding of how to make a solution and successfully enter the market.
To help people keep a healthy lifestyle despite COVID-19, we needed to quickly create a fitness app that would meet the audience needs and preferences. For this purpose, our software engineers followed the Agile best practices such as daily 15-minute meetings, functionality delivery every 2 weeks, and close cooperation with the customer.
As a result, the client always knew how the project was going, estimated the outcome of each stage, and provided feedback.

In our custom mobile app development company, we use Agile to give you control over the project and deliver the best quality.

Furthermore, our team leveraged a CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment) pipeline on the base of Visual Studio App Center. With CI/CD, we managed to build and test the product faster.
To offer an amazing user experience, we recommended the customer creating native applications for iOS and Android instead of employing cross-platform frameworks (cross-platform means that engineers write only one codebase for iOS and Android).
Yes, today cross-platform technologies such as React Native allow building solutions that look and behave almost like native ones. However, as the client aimed to attract millions of users in a mobile fitness app, it was important to achieve the highest performance, provide consistency across all devices, and ensure resilience to peak loads.

When making a fitness app, our team solved the following challenges:

  1. It was important to enable chat communications between users and trainers.
    Aiming to incorporate group and private chats in a mobile fitness application, our team used Firebase’s real-time database that allows storing and synchronizing the product data.
  2. A mobile fitness app had to provide users with the necessary information (e.g., exercises, fitness programs) with no limitations to specific tags and keywords.
    To provide full-text search despite multiple variations of search requests and mistakes in words, our mobile app developers used Elasticsearch, a search and analytics engine. This tool offers higher search speed and flexibility in comparison with databases such as MongoDB and PostgreSQL that have limitations on their existing query and index structures.
  3. The system had to enable automatic calculation and accrual of commission fees between 3 parties. In addition, it was important to ensure invoice compliance with the law.
    Our software engineers implemented an online payment system by adding Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay. When integrating Stripe, we had to include 3 parties into the payment process.
These parties were:
  • fitness content creators
  • mobile fitness app owners
  • Stripe
Using the Stripe API, our team enabled automatic calculation and accrual of commission fee for all of these parties. Then, we added two-step verification for fitness content creators, involving their personality and banking details.
Another task was to generate and send monthly PDF invoices to fitness content owners, explaining when and why payments were charged. However, Stripe’s documents didn’t conform to the legislation. To ensure compliance, our experts created the logic of invoice generation based on consultations with lawyers.
When integrating Apple Pay and Google Pay, our engineers had to generate security keys and invoices. Since the documentation was outdated in some cases, we made research, wrote detailed instructions, and put them in our knowledge base.

The key features

  1. User account
  2. Sign up and sign in
  3. Workouts and exercise programs
  4. Fitness trainer search
  5. Workout program search
  6. Reviews for trainers and workouts
  7. Calorie counting
  8. Push notifications
  9. Statistics visualization
  10. Upgrading to the premium functionality
  11. Online chat to communicate with trainers
  12. Payments via Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay
  13. A web admin panel for content management

Result

Collaborating with Arateg, the client developed a mobile fitness application for iOS and Android. With the delivered solution, the company was able to move the business online despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
Using the app, people can easily train at home, choose workout programs, check reviews for trainers and exercises, and more. Now the customer is going to launch an advertising campaign to grow the audience from 10,000 to over 500,000 users for the first version. At the moment, we are making the second version that would support multicurrency payments.

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