Angus Fox, CTO of Piota, discusses the development and management of native mobile apps tailored for the education sector, emphasizing the need for quality and innovative features. The document outlines the use of technologies like Joomla and Appcelerator for app development, CI/CD processes, and automation tools to streamline app updates and customer sign-up. Challenges in app submission and maintenance are highlighted, along with best practices for simplifying user experience and evolving APIs.

1. Angus Fox - @nuxnix
CTO, Piota, @Piotasocial, http://www.piota.co.uk
Director, @Multizone, http://www.multizone.co.uk
Secretary, Social Developers London, @socdevlon
https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/angus-fox/0/b16/457
LondonTitanium User Group
9 June 2015

2. Background Objectives Solutions Challenges
Conclusions
Questions /
Discussion
Zendesk
ticket
giveaway

3.  Multizone is an award winning software company providing
 CTO-to-go and mobile app development services for startups and
enterprises working in mobile, social, collaboration and eDiscovery
 Product management using talented community specialists for
development
▪ FirstAutomatedTest system for native phone apps 2004, Symbian)
▪ Our first Mobile Back End as a Service (MBaaS) built in 2008 on Appcelerator
▪ First MBaaS on the UK governmentG-Cloud supplier list
 Piota, is a privately funded early stage startup based in London.
 Idea genesis in 2014
 Piota required native mobile apps for the Education sector.
 Need to scale to support thousands of individually branded mobile
apps each supporting hundreds of users
 First app published December 2014 to App Store and Google Play
 Three dozen now in the stores, not all production yet

6.  App has to be better
than good
 Don’t build an app that
loads foreign content like
HTML or PDF
 Don’t build a web site on
a phone
 Do make it disruptive
 Do get the right team
 Do build the right
features (that’s the art of
product management
bit)

7. App Screens
 Home
 News
 Events / Calendar
 Info
 Contacts
 Push notification
 Forms
 Surveys

8.  Any item can be a push
notification
 Push goes via
Appcelerator cloudAPI
endpoint, mapped to
Apple and Google push
API
 Custom code runs as a
cron job
 And, yes, it does work on
an AppleWatch

9.  Why Joomla?...
 Stable & Secure
 Mobile Friendly
 Great to develop on
 All the good stuff there...
 OO & MVC
 jQuery
 Bootstrap
 Huge time-saver compared to writing from
scratch, provides many required features out-of-
the-box

10.  Uses Joomla! Front-end
 EachApp back-end has a separate Joomla!
install
 One custom template, branded per App
 Visually customised to match look & feel
 Extension for structured data - FieldsAttatch
 Extension for json RESTful API - jBackend
 Load of other glue we wrote

11.  Use as much of the
core functionality as
possible
 Keep the number of
extensions low
 Make the template
adaptable and
responsive

12. Paul Ryan, Angus Fox, Bronwyn Goodwin, Andy Gaskell
Not as illustrated 

13. So we made Apps...lots of ‘em

14.  Founder, Intensely involved
in school governance, Likes
Apps,Wants to build a
business
 CTO, 30 years in Product
management at Oracle,
Microsoft, HP, Startups
 App Dev: General + UI +Web
 App Dev: General + CI/CD
Delivery
 Web Dev: PHP, JavaScipt,
CSS etc
 Sales and Marketing
Director: Experienced in
education apps
 All remote
 Assembla + Skype, little or no
email
 Weekly conf call – ticket
review
 Monthly meetings
 2 week development cycles,
mostly
 Front end and back-end
working closely
 agile but not Agile
 Auto prioritisation of the
work – no surprises

15. ● simplify development processes for adding new schools via
task automation
● daily builds of app using Continuous Integration (CI)
● automate workflow of app release to beta testers (cross
platform)
● automate workflow for all provisioning steps, including push
notification on ACS
● change app structure to use dynamic data rather than static
configuration
● provide a customer sign up and configuration process

16. JavaScript
Calabash
Xcode

17. ● App uses single code base with
multiple themes
● Grunt task runner loads correct
tiapp.xml and config.json
● tiapp.xml node package used to
inject common values
● Grunt tasks use same
convention to aid ease of use
o grunt build:school:android,
o grunt build:school:ios,
o grunt build:school
o grunt build
o grunt test:school:android,
o grunt test:school:ios
o etc.

18. Assembla is used as
Source Code Repo and
Project Collaboration
Tool
Go Server used as CI
server
Merge/Pull request
approvals in assembla
trigger builds on the go
server

19. ● Google PublisherAPI used to deliver .apk
updates, screenshots and meta data updates.
● Screenshot production automated with
Grunt.
● Release to beta track on playstore
● Google Plus community used for alpha
members (invite only)

20. ● fastlane tools used for
iTunes Connect (ITC)
automation
https://fastlane.tools/
● provisioning profiles
created/updated on the fly
using fastlane/sigh
● screenshots created using
fastlane/screenshots and
instruments
● updates can optionally to
testflight release

22. ● cloud enable new ti apps from command line
● fastlane/pem used to automate push
notification certificate creation
● phantomjs/casperjs used to add push
certificates to app on ACS

23. ● App changed to reduce static config settings
with dynamic data
● Appropriate fallback to maintain user
experience

24. ● Give customer facility to choose (limited)
colours and icons
● Generate alloy theme on the fly and apply it
at build time

25. ● Apple and Google regulations for what can
and cannot be automated
● Testflight switch off /Testflight on iTunes
Connect (ITC)
● Appcelerator 4.0 / Platform changes
● Maturity of third party solutions
● Target environments not static

26.  Initially running on shared hosting, ok for 30
back-ends.
 Moved to a ManagedCloud Server
 New backends created from a backup seed
file.
 Scripted deployment

27.  A reliable and automated CI build system is
very complex to create
 ManyApp submission related tasks are not
easily automated
 iTunes submissions still get rejected for
random reasons
 Android fragmentation is not really an issue
 App stores don’t really want you to automate

28.  Develop with the future in mind
 Try not to accumulate technical debt
 App developers are not back end developers
 Ci / Cd is a specialism
 Users are typically quite non-technical, so
keep UI simple - things need to “just work”
 Write a good base API and evolve it
 APIs are just awesome
 “Shell” scripting in JavaScript / Node.js is
quite nice actually

29. Presentations are available from Slideshare
Slides
http://www.slideshare.net/nuxnix
Commercial Hackathon
Possibly 25-26 July – London - PAID
email me : angusf@piota.co.uk

30. King's Place, LONDON, UK
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-art-of-customer-satisfaction-2015-london-
tickets-16893983359
Email me