Brainbean Apps

The smart disc that attaches to the back of any watch

Project duration: 500+ hours

Team size: 5 members (3 developers, UX/UI designer, and PM)

Technology Stack: Java, RxJava 2, Dagger 2

Project Description

Chronos is a smart disc intended to be attached to the back of any analog watch.

With a dedicated companion app on a smartphone, the disc can be used to control music, get reminders, count steps and calories burned, control the phone’s camera shutter and more.

App Overview

The Chronos app connects to the Chronos disc via Bluetooth and provides following features:

• Music control

• Tapping the watch can make the phone vibrate or produce a sound

• Reminders and notifications on calls and text messages

• Step and burnt calorie counting (plus fitness goal tracking)

• Controlling phone camera shutter

• Silencing calls

• Camera control

Background

Brainbean Apps has designed and developed an Android app, built a back-end for the whole solution and delivered a website for the client.

The scope of our work included:

• Digital Strategy

• UI/UX Design

• Android App Development

• Front & Back-end Web Development

Challenges

• Create a reliable App that works smooth with unstable hardware

• Make the product work with various Android devices

• The app was required to work with a version of the firmware that was not yet finetuned and finalized at the moment

Value Added

• Android developers at Brainbean Apps established long-term connection between the smartphone and the disc on the Android SDK level (which is more flexible than the default system-level connection)

• Implemented third-party app notification parsing, which allowed users to set notifications of different vibration and color for the desired events related to other applications

• Our team gained even deeper experience with BLE for Android, RxJava 2, DFU, Google Fitness API, Custom Views, which in this case helped make the user experience smoother.

Smart home simplified

Project duration: 6000+ hours and ongoing

Team size: 8 members (iOS/Android developers, UX/UI designer, QA and PM)

Technology stack:

iOS: Xcode, Objective C

Android: Android Studio, RxJava 2, Dagger 2, Data Binding

Other: nRF Toolbox, Retrofit 2, OkHttp, AWS IoT, OrmLite, Timber, Phial, JUnit 4

Project Description

The Switchmate app lets users control their home lighting, cameras, doorbell, power sockets from their phone through a do-it-yourself one-second installation.

Devices communicate with a smartphone via the Bluetooth Low Energy/Wi-Fi technologies.

App Overview:

• Control existing switches or power ports

• Timers

• Over-the-air-firmware updates for devices

• Voice control

• Google Assistant and Alexa Support

• Communication with cloud

• Security system & away mode

• Video recording and playback

• Widgets and Push notifications

• Grouping of devices together

• Motion detection (plus windows sensors)

Background

Our team has built an iOS and Android apps from scratch.

In addition to the development, the scope of assigned work also includes interface design, project management, quality assurance as well as working together with teams from Taiwan, US, India.

Challenges

• Extremely tight deadlines prior to app release

• Deep expertise in Bluetooth and location services was required from the very start

• Create friendly ecosystem for the app, cloud, firmware and devices

• Rapidly changing business priorities

• Dealing with poor documentation for firmware and cloud

Value Added

Brainbean Apps team helped the firmware developers investigate and suggest fixes and improvements.

A scalable architecture was designed for sustainable user base growth.

Our experts wrote clean and smooth code for easy maintenance, so new device types and communication channels will be easy to add in the future.

A mobile social network for in-the-moment photo challenges

Project duration: 3500+ hours and ongoing

Team size: 7-8 members (iOS/Android, back/frontend developers, UX/UI designer, QA, PM)

Technology Stack:

iOS: Objective C, Swift

Android: Kotlin, RxJava 2, Dagger2

Project description

Kwippy is a selfie taking/sharing app that encourages users to post photos to their social media accounts, build followers, follow others, comment on photos, and see what other users did for the “photo of the day”.

App Overview:

In terms of UI Kwippy is very similar to Instagram and allows registered users to:

• Upload, like and comment photos

• Share photos to other social media

• Search for users and photos

• View leaderboards

• Get push notifications about upcoming challenges

More features are yet to be developed.

Background

The Brainbean Apps team took on the project from scratch.

The scope of our work has been:

• Digital Strategy

• UI/UX Design

• Android and iOS App Development

• Front & Back-end Web Development

Challenges

• Create a complex and engaging multi-layered UI

• The app needed to work with huge sets of images, so it was crucial to keep the performance on top at all times

• Working with camera on the API level

Value Added

• Brainbean Apps team had full control over the app implementation process and used a lot of innovative practices to make it as smooth, reliable and easy-to-extend as possible.

• Since the project took more than two years before the first release, our UI/UX expert had to redesign the app a few times to keep it modern and sleek, and eventually it hit the market outstandingly shiny, easy-to-use and modern

• We provided a lot of suggestions on the app’s functionality and architecture for it to better correspond to its mission and goals. Most of them were accepted by the client.

Links

iOS app page

Android app page

Kwippy Official Site