App to exercise from home

Due to the new restrictions caused by Covid-19, people’s daily lives were forced to face modifications in various aspects. Working, getting together with family and friends or exercising is not the same anymore. The whole world had to adjust to a new normal in order to continue with its routine.

Faced with this context, new ways of adapting to this new lifestyle began to emerge, where technology plays a fundamental role in offering alternatives.
More precisely in the field of physical activity, where all gyms were closed and sports activities were prohibited, it was very difficult for people to continue with their physical routine. It was then that thanks to one of our clients, we were faced with the opportunity to develop a technological solution to be able to offer gymnastics classes online.

This is how we got involved in the development of an app, which allows users to remotely access different sports classes and activities, in order to work on mobility and flexibility, and thus increase their sports performance.

To help our client achieve this, we provide a mobile development team made up of a technical leader with experience in both platforms and two other senior developers, based on iOS and Android respectively, to work hand in hand with the existing team on the side of the client.
Thanks to the synchronicity of all those involved, both backend and UX-UI issues were resolved, while our team was in charge of the frontend in parallel, through the implementation of technologies such as Kotlin and Swift for mobile applications.

Regarding the development carried out by Intermedia, it is worth mentioning that ExoPlayer for Android and AVPlayer for iOS were used for video processing. In the case of Segment, AppsFlyer, Firebase and Braze were integrated as destinations.

The main feature of this development is the playback of videos both on mobile devices, such as Chromecast or Apple TV, providing the user with diversity when it comes to being able to carry out a guided activity. In addition, it allows the tracking of all the activity, showing it in a friendly way and provides access to a Shop section for the purchase of clothing and accessories.

In addition, in these projects, In-App Purchases was integrated into both platforms to manage user subscriptions.

In-app Purchases (IAP), refers to a payment action that users perform within the application, without using the browser. Its correct use is to offer additional functionalities that add value to the user to encourage them to make a purchase. The IAP is native to phones and is configured from the iOS and Android store admin. In this way, from the apps side in a few days it can be implemented, as long as the products, services, prices, among others are configured from the store side.

In both Android and iOS, Forced updates were configured, this means that an update is sent to the user of the app and until they update, they cannot use it.
As it is a platform for making purchases and managing money, updates can become key in the face of a major change in the business.

This implementation of Force Update can be done easily via “Firebase remote config”, which allows to simplify the configuration of the minimum version of the app and activate the force update for users who do not reach it.

In addition, the project supports playback in PIP (Picture in Picture), for this the SDK of each platform was implemented. Each SDK required its corresponding programming to configure the desired functions. We worked so that streaming supports HLS and DASH formats, the most widely used adaptive quality protocols.