Industry Challenge
Our client sought to launch a feature-rich mobile application quickly and cost-effectively for both iOS and Android. The primary challenge was integrating a complex and frequently changing core feature-set within a PCI-compliant, multi-step ticket booking process. Traditional native development would require significant effort, resulting in separate codebases for iOS, Android, and the existing web platform. This would lead to higher development costs, extended time-to-market, and future maintenance complexities
Our Solution: A Performance-Focused Hybrid Architecture
We proposed and implemented a hybrid mobile application architecture, leveraging the strengths of both native code and web views. This approach delivered a high-performance native user experience for core features whilst embedding the booking flow within a single, shared web view mirroring the look and feel of the native elements.
-
Native Shell: The app’s foundation, navigation, and core device-specific functionalities, such as push notifications and camera access, used native code for optimal performance and user experience.
-
Integrated Web View for Booking: The entire ticket booking and purchase process was integrated via an embedded web view, directly leveraging the client’s existing, proven web platform code and mirroring the native look at feel.
-
Seamless Bridge: We ensured a smooth, reliable communication layer between the native shell and the web view, allowing for seamless data exchange and a unified user experience. This bridge allowed us to maintain a single customer view from start to finish.
Can Factory’s Approach: Maximising Efficiency and Agility
Our strategy centred on a “Develop Once, Deploy Everywhere” principle for the critical booking flow, significantly reducing redundancy and boosting agility.
-
Single Codebase for Core Logic: Embedding the booking flow in a web view meant the client only had one codebase (the web platform’s) to develop and maintain for iOS, Android, and the web.
-
Reduced Development Time & Cost: This approach eliminated the need to build and test the complex booking logic three times, resulting in a faster time-to-market and substantial cost savings on initial development.
-
Agile Maintenance & Speed to Market: Crucially, all changes or optimisations to the booking flow are deployed centrally by updating the web code. This bypasses the lengthy process of modifying multiple native codebases, submitting new versions to the App Stores, and waiting for user updates. It also allowed the marketing team granular control over every aspect of each launch.
-
Consistent Experience: Customers enjoyed a pixel-perfect, consistent experience across all platforms, as the critical business logic was rendered from a single, authoritative source.
Business Impact
Can Factory delivered a robust, market-ready mobile application that provides a premium user experience. Our hybrid approach eliminated code duplication, significantly reducing the total cost of ownership in development, maintenance, and future rollouts. We engineered for increased velocity, allowing instant new features and bug fixes without mandatory user updates.
Adopting a single web codebase for the critical transaction flow ensured a consistent user experience across all digital channels. This strategy maximised resource utilisation, enabling specialised native development only for features that truly require device-specific performance, while leveraging the existing web team for the complex, core booking logic.
If you are facing similar challenges, get in touch and we’d be happy to talk through our experience in this area with you.