Mobile Application Development

We’ve developed a number of mobile applications for iPhone and Android platforms, for example:

• Android Kashflow (“KashDroid”) - native application, designed to allow business owners to easily keep an eye on their accounts status
• Food Standards Agency – Food Hygiene iOS and Android applications. The app combines real time data with the geo-location (so the user can find hygiene ratings for nearby businesses) along with display of the results on a map.
• ScoresOnTheDoors Food Hygiene iPhone and Android application - geo-location (“What businesses are nearby?”), augmented reality (pointing the phone at a premise, and have it’s information appear onscreen) and mobile search (“Find me cafe businesses in Redditch, ordered by rating”).
• iPhone applications for small businesses — (see e.g. iNewitt providing a recipe list, cooking calculator – utilising alarms and notifications)
• Android Ultra-mobile cooking application (I’m Watch) .
• Android Car delivery application – allowing mobile employees to receive, create and work on jobs. One interesting aspect about this application is that it is designed to be functional even if no network reception is available through a sophisticated event queuing and notification system. The project involves both ‘native’ Java core and a HTML5 based UI.
• Android VCi - Business application providing workflow and process for engineers / remote workers.

In terms of functionality:

• Augmented Reality — we’ve utilised augmented reality with overlaid text, allowing the user to point their phone at a premise and see the appropriate food hygiene rating.
• Shopping cart support — with the Paypal API allowing the user to purchase products via the application.
• Network detection – to change how an application behaves if there is no wifi/cellular coverage.
• GPS Detection – if no location information can be found, change the application’s behaviour.
• Background service support — handling push notifications, queuing jobs and updates to be sent to a central server, or just sounding an alarm when a set time has passed.
• Push notification support — allowing the user (or application) to be notified remotely without the requirement for the application to poll a server.
• Integrated alarm/alert notifications — to notify the user when a predefined event has occurred.
• Geo-location — eg. “find my nearest…”
• Social Media Integration — allowing the user to link data on the application into their social network (facebook/twitter…).
• Feedback Reporting — helping users provide feedback to the appropriate app store.
• Utilising back-end (remote) APIs like REST — for data retrieval.
• Local data storage — using the devices local data store to aid performance and structured data retrieval.

Our applications tend to be based either upon the PhoneGap framework, or natively. Which approach we chose will depend on the project’s requirements – for example, PhoneGap aids cross platform support (Apple iOS, Android, BlackBerry Webworks) – while writing an app natively will lead to better performance, but less code reuse is possible when moving to other platforms.

Please contact us for further information.