TECHNOLOGIES
The Situation
Social Knowledge creates RV LIFE, a platform to make camping simple. Social Knowledge approached SitePen to help offer a mobile application for their RV retail partners, offering a subset of RV LIFE features within the same platform as a whitelabel product experience.
Key functionality includes managing user profiles, providing roadside assistance to their users, and utilizing mapping technology to serve rich data and reviews to their users.
The Solution
SitePen created a lightweight mobile application for Social Knowledge using the React Native framework. This allowed SitePen to develop iOS and Android apps simultaneously using the same maintainable codebase with web technologies. Changes get made to both app derivatives simultaneously, providing a much faster feature rollout time compared to separate native app code bases.
SitePen also selected the Expo platform as a starting point for the RV Retailer application. It provides a streamlined process for development and for deploying to devices for testing via the expo client. Development speed for this application was critical to Social Knowledge as it is to most organizations! Expo allows easy over-the-air updates to applications, providing new features and bug fixes to test users much quicker than traditional approaches via app stores.
Working with TypeScript allowed SitePen to quickly and efficiently collaborate with a distributed team allowing for interfaces and the Typescript type system ensures compatibility between components and APIs.
Jest was selected for the testing framework due to its compatibility with React Native. Jest allows developers to write unit rests that exercise component APIs and snapshot tests, ensuring components get rendered as expected. Combined these tests are both efficient to create and maintain, and also vastly improve product confidence when making changes, minimizing downtime caused by future mistakes.
Social Knowledge expressed an interest in adding end-to-end tests to the application so SitePen set up an approach utilizing Cavy as the test runner. Cavy provides compatibility with the Expo platform and both Android and iOS out of the box. This enabled us to deliver functional tests along with the application with full OS coverage and allows Social Knowledge to continue adding tests as application functionality grows in the future.
The Result
SitePen developed and delivered an app-store ready, customizable application to Social Knowledge within a very concise time frame. SitePen removed the need to write platform-specific code, greatly improving the barrier to entry and development time required to add new features. All of this was done without compromising on any of the client’s wishes and with a full suite of unit tests.
Other Social Knowledge Projects
Trip Wizard
Social Knowledge had a powerful application that was created in a pre-ES2015 world and it was becoming increasingly difficult to efficiently make updates and improvements to its platform. Social Knowledge needed to accelerate their modernization efforts to streamline and modernize their development efforts.
VIEW CASE STUDY
RV LIFE
RV LIFE helps campers simplify their adventures before, during, and after their journeys. The realm of mobile app development is continuously evolving and Social Knowledge needed to accelerate their efforts to refactor their codebase and remove existing obstacles.
VIEW CASE STUDY
Are you struggling to modernize existing solutions while striving to meet the feature demands of your growing customer base?
Contact us to gain the experience of our complete, cross-functional team to address your competing priorities.
Let's connect