Bingebooks — a catalog of books with links to retailers

BingeBooks is an online community created by authors and book lovers. The purpose of the service is to help users discover new works, genres and authors with recommendations for a bargain.

The client contacted us with a request to create mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms. The service had already launched a website with many features, however, in order to launch applications as soon as possible, we decided to postpone some of them and primarily focus on the main functionality - content search, book browsing and managing user lists.

The main functions can be divided into: lists of recommendations from the authors of the service; search for books and authors; view information about the book: description, average rating, comments from other users, purchase offers; an audio player for listening to a demo version of an audiobook; reader for familiarization with the text version of the book; the ability to manage personal lists for the management of interesting or already read books.

For app development, we chose the cross-platform Flutter framework. This gave us the opportunity to develop 2 apps at once, which significantly reduced the cost of the project in development, support and minimized the time for making changes. And as a bonus, Flutter makes it possible in the future to extend existing apps to the desktop: Windows, MacOS and Linux, at minimal cost. To do this, you just need to adapt the design!

When choosing the project architecture, it was decided to use the most common BLoC pattern in the Flutter community in conjunction with the Clean Architecure approach. The solution is easy to maintain and test, and it will not be difficult for new developers on the project to understand the logic of its work. The backend part was already developed by the client team for the web version, but we only needed to integrate it into the app using Dio.