About the Client

Nación Films approached us with the need of develop a mobile app for their client FAIRIS. They needed for both, iOS and Android, to present information about their different products to their clients. They had some budget constraints and the app needed to be delivered in a particular timeframe. As one of our many projects we took the challenge and delivered.

Technological Challenges

The need for both iOS and Android required resources specialized in both platforms and to test separately but, given the timeframe and limited budget, the best option was to use a framework that would allow us to code and compile for both iOS and Android. To solve this, we used a cordova based framework, in this particular case, we used Phonegap which, at the time of developing, provided better tools for filling the gap.

One of the major challenges we faced was that, one of the requirements was to be able to pull content dynamically from the internet, but also for the App to be available offline. Sounds like a simple requirement but, for that to happen we needed to add a few things:

• Implement a backend server that the content editors can use to upload/update information, specially news, which came pretty frequently.
• Add a pre-loading component to the app that downloads a package from the backend server. To speed up the process next time, each asset is download separately, and there is a registry of which version of assets was sent so only the latest files are updated. Also there is a mechanism that controls the assets download, because, in some devices, making too many http requests will drop some downloads. There probably are other better solutions, but given the timeframe and budget it was one of the best options to come up with.