Ionic Deploy: When Custom App Development Is Your Only Solution

How Custom Mobile Application Development Solved a Hard Problem at Clevertech

Meet Robin: He is a pilot and keen aviator with a degree in Engineering. After flying his first plane at the age of 13, he climbed the ranks in the Royal Air Force making his way to Sergeant before leaving. He was a 2x British Zonal Trampolining Champion, training for 12 years, but now finds passion in gaming, 3-D printing, and motorcycling. Robin is a lot of things but fortunately for us, he is a Tech Lead at Clevertech. Fortunately for him, he's able to continue feeding his passions while being challenged with hard problems at Clevertech. Apply to be a Tech Lead at Clevertech.

Robin is a lot of things but fortunately for us, he is a Tech Lead at Clevertech. Fortunately for him, he's able to continue feeding his passions while being challenged with hard problems at Clevertech. Apply to be a Tech Lead at Clevertech!

• ACCEPTING THE CHALLENGE AND FINDING THE BEST PLATFORM

Building this type of mobile application had proven to be impossible to our clients. They reached out to us to see if we could solve their problem and we would soon find that the solution to this was found using the ionic framework.

We knew right off the bat that this was going to be more than a simple UI update - this was a whole custom application that needed to be fully functional. We decided to investigate a way to deliver one app from the app store that would essentially act as a "shell" to sub-apps that could decipher which section of the company each user is a part of. This was a difficult task to accomplish and posed a number of issues: the biggest being finding the ability to provide a variance in functionality between the different sectors. Fortunately for us, the Clevertech team is the best of the best: not limited by geography, a diverse group of developers all putting their heads together for one common cause.

Our client already had native applications for both iOS and Android, so we would have to inject a custom hybrid Ionic application into the existing codebase, rather than the typical native experience. This meant that we would be inserting a customized Ionic application into the native codebase that would then go on to download and present each sub application. **We needed to find the best platform to use. **

• ENTER: IONIC DEPLOY

Our solution was Ionic Deploy.

Deploy enables you and your team to send live code changes directly to your users when you’re ready, without waiting in line for painful App Store reviews and approvals. A good roundup of why Ionic can be found here: Why ionic?. We finally knew that an Ionic Deploy was the solution to our problem, but there was still work to be done. Out of the box, the Ionic Deploy is limited to allow only one app to another, but we needed much more. To some, this would be the end, but to us this was the just next hurdle that our team welcomed. We built code that manages the channels for each user to allow the right app to be chosen from a library of 40 apps without user interaction.

The use of deployment channels also allowed our client to manage each individual release schedule. This also meant that there would be no more waiting around for the next iOS release to get their changes in place. We implemented live updates so that the user would never have to experience any interruption and the new version of their mobile application would simply launch the next time it was opened on their device. Our app could now identify which codebase was relevant for each individual user and pull the necessary channel for that person – delivering beyond the requirement our client asked for.

• DELIVERING BEYOND EXPECTATIONS

This undertaking took the tremendous effort of a fantastic team to get this working in a seamless and fluid manner. We even sparked the interest of the Ionic team themselves and opened a great communication channel with them so they could assist us in any way we needed – a remarkable team to work with!

In the end, the once seemingly impossible idea became a reality with our own custom code with Ionic Deploy. Our team at Clevertech embraced the challenges that we were faced with along the way, rather than letting them limit us, allowing us to ultimately over deliver to our client.

To learn more, check out Robin’s video here. Want to work with us? See all open positions here.