Digital Publishing Platform for Sharing and Reading Short Stories

The Client

App Monkeys is a full-cycle software development company based in Germany. They are focused on designing, building and releasing web and mobile apps.

The Scope

App Monkeys partnered with a Berlin-based startup to develop an digital publishing platform for sharing and reading short stories. Azoft was working on MVP mobile app for iOS and Android with paid functionality and the ability to upload custom content.

The Solution

We’ve built both the frontend and backend of iOS and Android app versions.

Along with creating profiles and uploading content users can perform the following actions:

• Upload stories
• Choose stories from a list
• Filter stories by genre, favorite authors, date and rating
• Share stories on Facebook
• Register as a Reader or an Author
• Make in-app purchases to compliment favorite authors

Authors are welcomed to upload their stories. When added, a story is reviewed by admins and becomes publicly visible.

Available admin actions:

• Read and listen to stories
• Filter stories by date, genre, favorite authors and rating
• Add and edit genres
• Manage user accounts
• Edit user stories
• View purchase history

The Challenge

As is the case for most start-ups, the customer had a strictly limited budget and a tight timeline for MVP release. It also required a certain level of flexibility while defining and changing the requirements during the development process. The personalized approach of our team and the customer’s passion about their product allowed us to overcome such issues through several rounds of negotiations, defining GUI and functional changes to satisfy the customer and keep the budget under control.

Technologies

iOS, Swift, Viper, ViperMcFlurry, Alamofire, Android, RxJava, Dagger2, In-App Billing, Retrofit, OkHttp, ORMLite, DataBase, Yii2, Bootstrap, MySQL, PHP

The Outcome

The MVP was released on time with all required features. Very soon after the first release, the scope of a small additional development phase was formed. We added deeper Facebook integration and the ability for the users to purchase virtual flowers in the app and reward authors for the articles you like most.

The additional integration with Facebook has made social sharing possible and increased customer engagement. Imagine your friend using StoryApp and sharing his favorite story on Facebook. As long as you are not a user already and want to share his story in your feed, you’ll see the ad window offering to download the app from Google Play or Apple App Store.