technologies: SwiftUI, Apollo GraphQL, CoreData, Sourcery, Bitrise, Jetpack Compose, Hilt, offline-first approach, Jira, Figma, GitHub Actions.
Imagine stepping into the bureaucratic world of construction site personnel, where every day is a navigation through a sea of paperwork. Employees need access to a collection of documents, from architectural plans, site photographs to daily reports, timesheets, and others. Additionally, they generate numerous documents on-site, adding to the already substantial pile of documentation.
What if all this paperwork were just one click away on a smartphone or tablet? Critical documents would no longer be misplaced or damaged at construction sites, and access to sensitive information would be limited to individuals with the appropriate credentials.
Our client, Heinrich Schmid, is a building construction group, eagerly embracing digital transformation. One of their goals was to manage the whole construction documentation via smartphone or tablet and eliminate paper documentation. We were pleased to help them with this transition.
Our team takes care exclusively of mobile development. The backend is developed by another software company. It requires close cooperation between various development teams to sync apps with the backend properly.
Mockup examples designed by Heinrich Schmid's Product Design Team.
The initial phase involved launching the MVP – HS Baumappe iOS and Android applications designed to facilitate the creation and sharing of documents among the construction crew, clients, and external contractors. Thanks to sophisticated access management, only employees with the appropriate credentials can access the various documents, significantly enhancing security and data protection.
The client trusted us to choose the most optimal solutions, therefore we use top tools such as SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose highly recommended by Apple and Android.
We also made a strategic decision regarding the app architecture. We decided to build HS Baumappe as a multi-module application. Instead of building an app as a huge monolith, we separated the code into single responsibility modules. As a result, it improved developers’ productivity, code clarity, and interoperability. It also helps to save costs and scale the solution during the post-MVP phase.
Internet access is typically unreliable at construction sites. Therefore from the beginning, the priority was to build the offline-first application. Developing offline mode is always an interesting technological challenge. However, we have successfully delivered this feature for numerous clients. Thanks to an offline mode users can create any document without an internet connection and the app will store the data on the user’s device. All files will be synchronized when the internet connection is back.
The collaboration with Bright Inventions started off very promising. Based on our business needs, they gave great architectural advice, important technical information, and overall good guidance, which allowed an ambitious start into the project.
After months of smooth development and satisfying output, we were challenged with some very critical technical barriers, which collided with our business vision of the app. Due to great proactive efforts on Bright Inventions side, the Heinrich Schmid IT team, and the good communication towards our third-party backend developer team, we overcame this hurdle and managed to get the app behavior as envisioned and desired.
With the currently ongoing MVP release, the only point of criticism our users raised is the following: “We want more features!”. Therefore, the MVP release is a great success so far and we envision a lot more features to come in the app, together with our partner Bright Inventions.
Leon Seiz, Former Product Owner at Heinrich Schmid
Following the launch of the MVP, it received positive feedback from its end users. We continue to work on the mobile application adding other crucial features such as the digital signature of the documents.
