Mobile Apps for Local Media

Challenge

Worldnow provides high-quality apps for local news TV channels. There are dedicated apps for each of those channels, designed specifically for iPhone and iPad.

These apps provide up-to-the-second news, sports, traffic and weather reports including maps, radar and five-day forecasts for convenient access from your smartphone on the go. They are extremely handy solutions, allowing the customer to get breaking news, local headlines, traffic updates, and Severe Weather updates provided by Stormtracker, as well as reliable 24/7 weather forecasts directly from the channel. If the user wishes, they can also have weather alerts delivered to their phone by SMS, subject to a prior subscription.

Features:

• Watch the latest news and weather videos
• Monitor current weather conditions and get 7-day forecasts
• Check traffic before hitting the road
• Customize the app’s menu with your favorite categories

Several prestigious channels use these excellent apps, so even if you might not know it, Redwerk might be providing the backend for the news you’re watching right now!

Putting out high-quality and feature-packed apps is one thing, but making sure that they are bug-free and operate smoothly is quite another. That is why Redwerk was contracted with the maintenance and quality assurance for many of the almost one hundred iOS apps produced by Worldnow. Some of the problems which we have to resolve on a regular basis are, for example, difficulties with the loading of the news feed, app slowdown, duplicate news or weather reports which stop updating automatically. We also extend these apps’ functionality and add new useful features. We add new blocks (e.g., advertisements) and modify existing ones according to the ever-changing requirements of the customers.

Solution

Working with these kinds of apps and being able to maintain them and help them evolve requires deep knowledge of the underlying platforms and technologies. Besides, mobile apps development implies a need to efficiently deal with an unfamiliar code created by an external party. But this is not a problem for our offshore software development team, as we have strong development skills to provide top-quality custom iPhone app development services.
The most common aspects of our work are:

• Implementing new features
• Adapting code after changes in external APIs
• Fixing bugs in the provided code
• Finding alternative, better ways of solving problems which were not resolved in an ideal way
• Being creative to further improve an app’s functionality and usefulness to the customer

A large part of the tasks are related to displaying adverts received from Google Doubleclick. What we have to do here sometimes makes us think we are trying to achieve the impossible: making Apple and Google work together in a productive way! While Google has provided a framework for the display of adverts in iOS applications, the customer has not yet switched over to the new version of Doubleclick (due to the fact that advertising through this service is available not only for mobile applications, but also on the web resources). The only solution, therefore, is to bypass the limitations of the old platform manually, using UIWebView to display banners. This approach, while it is by far the best solution in this scenario, leads to additional issues which must be resolved.

Video displayed via UIWebView has its own set of challenges as well.

Another class of problems faced by any program coded in Objective C is memory management. Although Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), which was introduced in iOS 5, makes this process a lot easier, the programmer is still responsible for ensuring that there are no circular references, which may cause memory leaks and unexpected app crashes. Unstable apps are immediate candidates for uninstalling, so it is important to proceed with great care here.