Hobbii - an app for yarn lovers

CHALLENGE AND SOLUTION

The app we have been working on originates with the bingo games Hobbii holds for their users every week. The live-action video is streamed to the simple mobile app, which includes a video player with a simple game card overlay. As the audience grew, Hobbii decided to extend their web-based e-commerce platform and introduce this functionality to a dedicated native mobile app. This is where DO OK stepped in.

The cooperation started with two mobile developers augmenting Hobbii’s in-house teams, which then grew to five mobile developers, a designer, and a QA during peak activity. Team composition varied depending on the workload, with 2 mobile developers currently involved. Joining the Hobbii in-house team meant joining a diverse community of skilled individuals, always willing to help each other out. Our team immediately felt at home at Hobbii and learned the proper meaning of the word hygge.

While working on the mobile app, the most important value for Hobbii is the quality of the provided platform, so the team was given all of the required time, trust, and freedom to pick the right tools and technologies to get the job done.

The process of transition from a simple webview-based bingo game app to a powerful e-commerce platform started with evaluating the current codebase. Our team made the decision to scrap the iOS app and start development over from scratch, without needing to build on top of the existing codebase. Starting over from scratch for the Android app was not necessary, but there was one tricky point: using Jetpack Compose from the very beginning when the app was still in a very early alpha version, which was quite risky to use in production. However, this decision also had its advantages, such as significantly reduced screen creation time and no need to rewrite application screens from XML. In our experience, it is unusual for the client to give us so much trust, and agree to basically discarding the whole app and rewriting it from scratch. But that decision paid off immediately, with the app rewritten using state-of-the art frameworks, modularized, scalable, and thoroughly unit tested.

Currently, the e-commerce module has been in use for more than a year, greatly facilitating the purchase process for customers. The team has been working on bringing social networking features to the app, with enhancements such as newsfeeds and user project modules to be released shortly.

Thanks to the bold decisions made at the very beginning of our cooperation with Hobbii, the Android and iPhone apps are now active among more than 25k users every day, with a mean average rating of 4.9 out of 5 in the AppStore, and 4.2 out of 5 in the Play Store.

The most special thing about the whole Hobbii platform is that it never revolves around making a profit in the first place. You can genuinely feel that it is all about bringing creative people together and trying to make the world a better place.

We are thrilled about what the future will bring for Hobbii, and there are still so many exciting features in the pipeline!

Results

● Reimplementation of existing Bingo app from scratch on iOS

● Adopting scalable and testable architecture, which made adding new features easy

● Implementation of the e-commerce module

● Social networking features, to be released shortly

● Long-lasting cooperation, based on trust and high-quality results

● Thousands of users daily, great reviews in the app stores

● NPS 10/10