PORTFOLIO

Waddington's

Cross-platform mobile app for Canadian auction and appraisal company

It’s February 24, russia starts a full-scale war against Ukraine. The Kultprosvet team is in touch every hour, everyone is stressed out and trying to make difficult decisions fast. No one is working except for Andrey. Andrey Yarovoy is our PM and he is on his way to the office to publish mobile applications to Google Play and App Store.

It’s not some heroic stuff, it’s just we all worked so hard and everything is ready, and damn putin, but the troops won’t enter our home city Dnipro for a couple more hours, so... Two mobile apps for Android and iOS were published on February, 24. What a first release!

We met Waddington’s in April 2021

It's Canada’s most diverse auction and appraisal company with a founding date going back to 1850. The company is dealing with Asian, Canadian and International Fine Arts and Decorative Arts, as well as Fine Jewellery and Fine Wine&Spirits, conducting close to 100 auctions throughout the year. Waddington’s was looking for mobile app development expertise to provide their clients with the ability to bid in auctions from anywhere in the world.

A greater mobile experience with the nicely done interface and push notifications could do just that. Iryna Stankevich reached out to us via the website form, and we felt like we are on the same page from the very first meeting. We love to build great products with folks who are totally engaged and in love with what they do.

Kultprosvet’s owner Anton is highly energetic — when we talked to him, we left the meeting confident the partnership would be a good fit.

Iryna Stankevich, tech product manager at Waddington’s

WE BUILT the cross-platform mobile app for iOS and Android

The collaboration between both teams helped us create an intuitive UI/UX with plenty of features, including language management (English, French, and Chinese), a built-in currency converter, custom notifications, and much more.

Waddington’s team had a clear vision of the project. Their in-house back-end developer was strategically engaged in this project, providing Kultprosvet's team with the platform to build upon.

React Native as a key technology

When you start thinking about the technology stack for a mobile app, it all comes down to four basic approaches. Even two, in most cases: build a native app or use cross-platform tools? We do both, yet, a few years ago, the balance in the team changed. While we still have a few dedicated native iOS and Android developers, we expanded our team with more cross-platform engineers.

Cross-platform technologies evolved immensely during the past years, bringing new shiny opportunities to shorten time-to-market and maintain one team instead of two while still providing great performance and user experience.

There are several cross-platform technologies out there. We choose Facebook’s React Native. It is backed up by a huge corporation and therefore is always well-maintained and developed. React Native allows writing code in JavaScript and rendering it to a native app on both iOS and Android.

The technology gives a truly native-like experience to a user since the camera, GPS and contacts look and behave the way the user is used to. The big perk is that the changes are done once in JS code, updated, and published to Android and iOS stores automatically.

If you build an online shop or an auction app, React Native does a great job. There is a bunch of built-in modules, time-to-market is impressively fast, and the user experience is great.

Vasyl Bodnaruk, React Native developer at Kultprosvet

Intuitive UI/UX

The interface provides comprehensive tools to place bids both manually and automatically. Bidders can follow the bidding process and get important news via custom notifications. Financial transactions, such as invoices and payments, can be made directly in the application.

We appreciated Waddington’s comprehensive brand identity guides. Going in line with the styles, we built a clearly designed mobile app and a delightful experience for bidders all over the globe as well as the auction team.

What’s next?

We are continuously working on updating and improving the app and implementing new useful features. This is an ongoing engagement.

As we publish this text, our R&D department is working on some intriguing stuff, and we will come to update this story soon.

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