Cybex: A Bluetooth app focused on children's safety
Cybex decided to take advantage of automatic monitoring in their car seats, and they came to us to help create a modern, functional application for parents that saves lives.
The challenge
Our mission was to design a mobile app for use with car seat sensors, secure the entire development process, and make sure the app worked seamlessly with different hardware across different global markets. The biggest challenge was to fine-tune flawless communication on all platforms and mobile devices. The diversity of Bluetooth connection on devices by various producers concerned us the most — although Android provides a unified API, different devices have different schemes. Another challenge was the sustainability and scalability of such a complex project.
Our solution
We set up a dedicated product team of seven people to develop, design, and test the client's app. We sought a platform that would help with development, could be easily debugged, and was reliable. We came up with a unique solution inspired by EventSourcing that forms the backbone of the hybrid architecture. Thanks to this, we are able to fine-tune and debug even the most exotic statuses caused by differences in hardware, versions of the OS, and miscellaneous conditions in the field.
For Android, we used reactive programming (ReactiveX) for consistent processing of asynchronous input data. We created a structure above the RxAndroidBLe library that solves the challenge of different Android devices. For iOS, we kept the core as simple as possible with minimal third-party dependencies — Swift 5, CoreBluetooth, GRDB, and our own CoreBluetooth testing library.
Results
In the latest version, we completely redesigned the app under the hood and used the potential of event sourcing customized for the mobile environment. This gave us the ability to efficiently write testable code and easily implement functionality changes. The biggest advantage is that event sourcing gives us the ability to reproduce the exact behavior of the app at the user level, and effectively detect and correct bugs.
The mobile application is already used by 500K+ satisfied users. We continue to improve the app and can now offer communication with new client products as well.
Technologies
“Cookielab is a software agency that helps companies and startups build big things. We helped our client Cybex develop a mobile application SensorSafe that saves lives. We are involved in projects at various stages — we help not only with development, but also with management, invention, and long-term maintenance. We are talking about a longer-term partnership.”