Knowlesco.com
Project Year: 2016
Project Timeframe: 1 month
About: KnowlesCo.com is #1 rental and real estate company on Mount Desert Island, a popular East coast vacation destination including the town of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park.
Company Size: 10
Company Location: Northeast Harbor, Maine
Founded: 1898
Introduction
OGO Sense helped the Knowles Company complete their current website and assists with ongoing technical maintenance and Internet marketing improvements. Before developing the current iOS app, OGO Sense created the same version of the app for Android phones.Problem
Potential users of Knowles Homeowner app mostly use iOS devices. Considering that only Android app prototype was available, we faced troubles evaluating the app with iPhone and iPad users. So, we created an iOS version of the app.Although the workflow and functionalities are the same for Android and iOS, the design and development and design process was completely different. To start from the basics, for the development of the Android app our developers used Java, while iOS development requires experience with Swift programming language. XCode is integrated development environment for iOS development, while Android is using Android Studio. iOS apps could only be built using Mac, so we had to ensure to have appropriate development tools, while Android application could be developed using Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.
The most visible aspect for the end users is app design. General style, navigation and the look of icons and buttons are different and require different design process and respect of appropriate design principles, where the design process for iOS is more complicated than for Android. For example, Android has a built-in slider to switch between different views. For the iOS app our developer had to make this slider on his own using and modifying the slider library.
Solution
Our development team spent a couple of months and developed an iOS version of the mobile app. The iOS app is developed completely from the scratch and has all the same features and functionalities as the Android app. One of the challenges for our developers during the iOS app development was not so wide and extensive development community, so many of the iOS functionalities had be made from scratch. For example, the calendar activity for the iOS version had to be made from scratch, while for Android we could reuse an existing pre-built option.From the testing point of view, it was easier to test iOS as it works the same on all iOS devices, while Android version had to be tested on different versions of the software. Also, when we wanted to share the Android app with test users it was enough to send the installation package via email, while we had to physically connect a mac with our iphone to install the iOS app.
Overall, development of iOS app required much more of own logic and problem solving to get necessary features, while Android development was simpler as Android studio offers a lot of prebuilt features.