Open sourced mobile apps...

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mark Headd on August 31, 2010 at 8:18am

Jeremy - this is awesome!

I love that you've got the code for these apps on GitHub. This is an excellent way to share with other governments and encourage them to improve the apps you have built and benefit not only their citizens but yours as well.

I also love that you guys developed the iPhone app in C# with Mono - I'm a big fan of MonoDevelop so I'll be checking that app out myself.

Thanks!

Permalink Reply by GovLoop on August 31, 2010 at 8:39am

Pretty cool.

How long did it take to build? Time/staff? Biggest lessons learned? What worked/didnt?

Permalink Reply by Jeremy Bertrand on August 31, 2010 at 4:24pm

We only had one developer working in it and it took him about one month to do the Android app and several months to do the iPhone app.

Lessons learned:
Establish time to continue to make upgrades to the app.
Both are different code bases and different coding environments so be sure to give your developer time to adjust to the differences and nuances in each.
Just like a website be sure to put it onto some early adopters phones and let them test it out to provide feedback. Watching people use the app was a great eye opener about what we could do to improve it.
Be wary of forum sites who offer advice. The advice was great but we inherited so much malware from visiting these sites we had to reinstall the operating system on the pc used for research.
Hate to stereotype but found this to be true: Android users tend to be grateful and provide great feedback, iPhone users tend to be less forgiving and have a sense of entitlement and will tell you that you suck rather than tell you what you can do better.
If using a 3rd party tool within the app be sure to give that company credit. We used a Google map for traffic info and Apple initially denied us entry into the store because the Google logo wasn't visible when the traffic map was loaded onto the screen.