First Line Software is a premier provider of software engineering, software enablement, and digital transformation services. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the global staff of 400 technical experts serve clients across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Mobile App Development can be complicated, depending on the functionality required and the number of systems that will need to interact with the mobile app. The experts at First Line Software have already proven their ability to develop complex mobile solutions for customers. Let’s take a closer look at the broad range of expertise and technical knowledge the team has accumulated from their work on numerous projects.
Front-end, Back-end, Testing, Deployment and Publishing
The First Line mobile app development team has developed apps that include a high-performing back-end, web-based front-end with an Admin panel for data manipulation and analysis, and operate on a range of platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Phone) and form-factors (Phone, Tablet). One of the most important components of mobile app development is performing comprehensive testing that addresses the functionality, integration, performance, and stability of the app. The final steps include the deployment of server-side components and publishing mobile applications to the relevant app stores.
UI and UX Design
For this critical aspect of mobile development, First Line designers and developers strictly follow the iOS Human Interface Guidelines and Android User Interface Guidelines. That said the implementation of custom design ideas is also a solid component of the mobile team’s expertise.
Integration with third-party APIs and Open APIs
This is another area where First Line mobile app development experts have accumulated significant experience including financial, travel, and enterprise solutions. Engineers at First Line have often been early adopters of using Open APIs provided by different platforms such as Lufthansa Open API and Citi Developer Hub.
Internet of Things (IoT) Market
Developing mobile apps for the Internet of Things (IoT) market has provided the team with a substantial amount of the experience they have accumulated to date. This includes interaction with a variety of custom devices and knowledge of multiple wireless protocols are key advantages of the First Line mobile experts. The team gets involved in the firmware design and protocol definition phases to avoid re-do work later on during the integration phases.
A Solid Foundation of Education
While the experience in mobile app development is significant, the best possible education is a precursor to experience. Our engineers are highly educated in Computer Science and possess strong mathematical backgrounds, equipping them for creating highly efficient wireless protocol implementations, optimizing data traffic, and accurately minimizing battery consumption – without negatively impacting the user experience.
For example, one of our smart-watch projects included a requirement to synchronize a daily pattern (96 segments) between the mobile app and the watch. Each segment might have a white, gray, or black color. Usually, this type of model requires 24 bytes to transfer the data; but a limitation of the Bluetooth Low Energy packet is 20 bytes. Our experts were able to design and implement a protocol that only used 20 bytes for encoding all 96 segments. As a result, the synchronization runs twice as fast as other apps and with higher energy efficiency on both the phone and watch levels.
Selected examples of Mobile App Development projects
The Calendar Watch by What combines the art of custom watchmaking and one-of-a-kind design with an always visible daily calendar that syncs with the most common digital calendars, so users can view their day at-a-glance.After thorough testing and studying the requirements, we arrived at the conclusion that the best user experience would be achieved by making the theCalendarWatchas simple as possible. All extraneous features were removed from the app and online calendars. No extra buttons or unnecessary functions remained in the specifications for the app. The watch also saves the time users would typically use to constantly open and check calendars, which allows them to stay focused on their top priorities for the day.
First Line developed the mobile user interface and the back-end, designed the Bluetooth protocol, and performed all of the necessary testings.
What? Now offers a brand new way to keep track of those special moments in a person’s life, and to view time in Moments rather than in hours and minutes. By adding a Moment, a digital timeline is created and animated with photos. What? Now is also a personal social network that allows users to share what matters most with the people who matter most to them. What? Now works in harmony with What? Watches. Once a user has created a profile on the app, their moments will sync seamlessly with the watch.
First Line built the mobile app for end-users and a testing station for the manufacturer including functional testing and low-level (RF) testing. The testing function also included analysis.
Clinic to Cloud is a secure, scalable Medical Practice Management Platform that optimizes practice operations, improves financial performance, and delivers better patient experiences. Fully mobile-enabled, and available across any desktop, tablet or mobile device (PC, Mac or Android), Clinic to Cloud allows doctors and their staff to access all the information they need when they need it.
The feature-rich platform allows healthcare professionals to:
- View their schedules
- Access a patient’s full health record
- Review and address lab results
- Manage and dictate clinical letters, with the option of Voice Recognition
- Streamline patient communications
- Create and manage eTasks
- Take images and link them directly to patient records
The mobile app uses a high level of encryption to securely communicate with the Clinic to Cloud platform. To log into the app the doctor must first create an account, once logged in, the doctor can create and select the fast login option by pre-defining a PIN Code or using the inbuilt biometric scanner.
First Line had a team of 25 engineers build both the Web Azure and mobile versions of this application. Both versions are live and being used by thousands of healthcare professionals throughout Southeast Asia and Australia.
First Line Software was engaged to develop a mobile application for indoor navigation of a specific train station. The passengers in a train station were able to identify their current location within the station, receive schedule and arrival/departure platform details, and find the shortest route from where they are in the station to a specific platform. The app, which supports both Android and iOS, includes an option to guide visually-impaired passengers using audio navigation. Navigation of the station is based on the standard protocol BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) which connects with Bluetooth beacons (iBeacon) populated throughout the station.
Our mobile app engineers are always looking forward to the next interesting mobile app development project. We invite you to contact us today and tell us about your mobile initiative.