We built two 100% native apps in 48h using Appzio. Can you beat that?

Written by timster | Published 2018/05/14
Tech Story Tags: mobile-app-development | native-mobile-apps | appzio | adidas | hackathons

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

Download link for app available.

Little background

Adidas organized a hackathon over the last weekend and we saw the perfect opportunity to showcase what Appzio is capable of. We formed a team to prove that it’s possible to start from scratch and deliver a complex native app in just one weekend.

App concept

Our concept was based around connecting fans, local fan clubs & local venues (such as bars) that host events around football matches. We wanted to build something that would give value to all user groups and at the same time bring Adidas closer to the fans.

Over 160 people took part in the event.

Saturday

The Hackathon started at 10:00 AM on Saturday. Adidas revealed the challenges and gave briefing to the teams. It is important to note that we had no information about the challenge in advance. We had to start from scratch, create a concept and execute it.

Our team was comprised of four coding ninjas: Kamen, Viktor, Daniel and myself. We also had Simeon to help out with the concept creation and the app design.

At 11:00 we started putting together the concept for what was to be built. It included three different user roles. You can download the written concept description here. Afterwards we started making the designs that we based on the Appzio UI Kit. You can check them out here, here and here.At 12:00 we started creating the overall structure and building the Appzio modules that would be required for the app. At 13:00 the actual coding started. We coded for the rest of the day, me and Viktor staying until 1am. Daniel participated for part of the day and implemented an API to pull data about football matches.

Sunday

After just a few hours of sleep we gathered again to finish what we started.

The coding ninjas in action. Front to back & left to right we have Viktor, Kamen, me (Timo) and Daniel.

At 08:00 we continued codingAt 14:00 we stopped the main development. We did some QA, fixed few bugs and improved presentation on few screens.At 16:00 we presented the concept in front of the jury and audience (see the pitch here). You can also download the presentation .pdf here.

End of the hackathon and our results — Videodrive.google.com

See the app for yourself

The only dummy screen you’ll see is the leader board. All other views are fully functional and the app can support unlimited number of users, thanks to Appzio’s infrastructure.

To give you an idea about the scope of the app, here are full screens from the finished app.

Registration & login

Screens for the venue and fan clubs

Screens for the fan

You can check the app yourself. Simply download the Android version from the link below. Drop a comment if you’d like to have a TestFlight invitation for the iOS app.

LINK TO APP FOR ANDROID

The team

Here I would like to summarize the efforts of each team member. Shout out to you guys, without you, this would not have been possible!

Simeon Mitev — Saturday about 8h in concept creation and business case buildingKamen Dobrev — About 12h on the mobile development. We didn’t actually need mobile development to realize these apps, but we took this as an opportunity to improve on some of our animations.Viktor Velkov from Programista, who has worked since last summer with the Appzio platform — About 18h on the actual app building with PHPDaniel Minchev — About 12h on the actual app building with PHPTimo Railo (me) — Some 15h on the actual app building with PHP

Can you beat us?

The total app development time for this project was roughly 48h.

The end result is a snappy, polished app (ok, the visuals would still need little up-lifting), that is fully native. No web views, no hybrid mumbo-jumbo.

We are rather curious — can you achieve the same result faster with another technology?

We think not.

But we dare you to prove us wrong.


Written by timster | CTO, Jack of rather many trades. Loves building things. Curious. Very curious.
Published by HackerNoon on 2018/05/14