DreamTrak — goal achievement tracking app

Stfalcon Task

To create an application for accomplishing the actions that help reach goals and record daily thought, mood via video and audio. And create a special feature for students — homework tracker.

Solution

Stfalcon provided full-cycle product development:

• User Experience Design
• Interface Design
• Android and iOS Development
• Manual testing
• Quality assurance and
• Implementation

The first thing our team did was the research and analysis of the application’s target audience- teenagers. Since this age group is usually overconfident as to their web abilities, but demonstrates lower performance, reading level and undeveloped research skills, we made up our mind to create a playful UI design.

Technologies

Almost from the very beginning, we made up our mind to use the gaining popularity Flutter SDK. The main decisive factors were the speed of development and the single code base for iOS and Android. It’s nowadays extremely important for the rapidly growing apps.

First, the iOS app version was crafted, then some UI elements were adopted for Android. We used Flutter for cross-platform development because it helps quickly and easily build UIs and fix bugs. Stfalcon developers managed to achieve the UI behavior, which is practically indistinguishable from that of the native apps and, at the same time to preserve the distinguishing features of both platforms. Besides, due to the usage of BLoC architecture combined with the Clean Architecture principles we’ve got an app flexible to support. Since the app has two types of users with different systems of action checking: students and other people, these two groups were united in one system and differentiated only in the statuses of checking — 3 for student and 2 for the rest of the audience. This solution was beneficial both for the users, simplifying their life, and for the backend team, making their work easier as well.

The backend was divided into two parts. The first one is an admin panel that allows performing a number of operations, for instance, to manage users and reference data, look the feedbacks through and so on. The second part is the REST API for data exchange with the client mobile app. In the frame of the app business logic, Google and Facebook logins and the integration with the services sending SMS and push-notifications were implemented. We also used ElasticSearch to speed up the search results.

The testing and operation environments are realized in Kubernetes. It allows testing the application in the conditions most closely approximating production. The Kubernetes technology in its turn increases the reliability and the fault tolerance of the product server part as well as the system as a whole.