Cross-platform Applications To Find and Manage Hangout Spots

Business Overview

Our client is a software provider that operates in the Israeli entertainment market. The company decided to streamline the process of searching, visiting, and organizing various engaging events and make it more convenient. To this end, they opted to develop two separate applications that would complement each other, meeting the needs of the following target audiences:

End-users who want to find the perfect place to go out—bars, parties, restaurants, festivals, etc.
Business owners and event hosts to help them better promote their services, attracting more customers.

The client aimed to create an efficient interaction platform for these audiences, intending to generate revenue through a percentage of ticket sales and service orders processed via the app.

Initially, the company worked on the project with its own in-house resources, implementing the basic functionality for the customer-facing app. After a while, the client decided to enhance the development process with professional assistance and turned to NIX, a company with a proven tech background and long-term mobile engineering expertise across domains.

Project Scope

Our work scope included the creation of two cross-platform mobile applications:

Customer-facing solution based on the existing legacy app

Business-facing application built from ground up

Challenges

The customer-facing legacy application had non-scalable architecture, resulting in inflexible, rigid code with high coupling and potentially low quality. This made adding new features a true challenge and increased the risk of unexpected bugs.
The apps were being developed during the coronavirus pandemic, when customers could attend events only with a digital COVID vaccination certificate. The client wanted to be one of the first to offer a solution for scanning these access codes, which greatly tightened the project deadline.

Solution

Our team developed two user-friendly applications based on Flutter, a reliable open-source framework. We chose this technology for its powerful cross-platform capabilities, allowing us to use a single codebase to implement iOS and Android support. As a result, we were able to significantly speed up the time to market and reduce development and maintenance costs, which would be an option with two native apps.

Customer’s App
Business App

Customer’s App

This customer-facing solution builds upon a legacy code and enhances the client’s existing application. With its help, users can easily find and attend favorite events, venues, and other entertaining activities.

Key Features

Explore: Discover new and exciting venues and events and see popular or promoted spots to explore more options for a good time.
Search: Intuitively search for places and events by tags, categories, dates, location, and more.
Nearby: Easily locate bars, cafes, restaurants, nightclubs, and other institutions on the map, view images, check ratings, and read brief information.
Events: Access detailed information about nearby events and easily purchase tickets for them.
Favorites: Conveniently save favorite spots for easy access.
Booking: Make reservations and enter events or book tables using QR codes.
Ordering: Select and order favorite dishes and drinks in chosen places.

Business App

We built this business-facing app from scratch, enabling companies to add, manage, and promote events and establishments in the most effortless way.

Key Features

Venue & Event Management: Easily add and manage information about institutions and events, including descriptions, images, locations, timings, and more.
Menu Content: Create and update menus for the venue, including dishes, drinks, descriptions, ingredients, and prices.
Table Reservations: Efficiently manage table reservations and allow customers to book available spots in advance.
Ticket Management: Add and sell tickets for events with different prices, types, and availability.
Promo Code Management: Generate promotional codes for discounts or special offers to customers.
Secure Payments: Easily and securely accept payments from customers for tickets, table bookings, and other services.
Order History: Store and access a full history of customer orders for sales tracking and analysis.

App Architecture Enhancement

We improved and refined the customer app’s architecture by refactoring the legacy code and implementing more modern techniques like Clean Architecture and BLoC. This involved dividing the application into separate layers, each with a specific function, and separating the business logic from the user interface. The chosen approach provided us with greater flexibility when working with the codebase and enhanced the overall development process, making it easy to maintain and scale applications.

Custom UI Elements & Animations

Based on the design provided by the client, our experts developed custom UI elements and complex animations. That’s another reason for choosing Flutter, as this framework copes perfectly with design-related tasks and enables the creation of complex visual effects while maintaining a consistent app style across multiple platforms.

Scanning QR codes

The application’s functionality involves scanning QR codes to check tickets, access reserved tables, verify vaccination certificates, and more. At that moment, there were no ready-made libraries to cover all the requirements for this feature, so we proposed our custom solution and wrote native code for the Android and iOS app versions.

Outcome

Joining forces with the client’s team, we created complementary, cross-platform applications with iOS and Android support, empowering both customers and businesses. Thus, we offered end-users a convenient central hub for discovering and engaging with exciting events and provided businesses with a streamlined communication channel and audience insights.

This highly efficient, smoothly running digital marketplace brought event-goers and organizers closer together, bridging gaps between them. Users embraced the new seamless experience, leading to their increased involvement and activity and translating into lucrative benefits for businesses, which were able to attract a paying audience and foster long-term customer loyalty.