Learnings from building Army for Life mobile app

1. Product Idea

The idea was to build a digital version of the spiritual adoption prayer which helps to share the prayer with more people and to improve the experience of the people who are already following the prayer.

2. Making a POC and testing over a small audience

As a first step, we build a minimal web version of the product and tested it in a group of around 50 people in a region. The product was built with react and the data was stored in the browser's local storage API. We also integrated analytics to learn how the users were using the app.

The app is still live and you can use it here

Few learnings:

• The prayer progress was lost when users switched devices.

• Some users missed praying as there were no daily reminders.

• The UI/UX could be improved.

• The user needs to open the browser, type the URL to start praying which added friction to the process.

3. New goal and building a team

After collecting the feedback from the initial users we found that investing in a better product will be worth it.

Our team size increased as we found some like-minded people who were interested in contributing to UI/UX design, graphic design, engineering, content writing, project management, product management, and advisory roles.

The plan was to build a better product and scale it to 5 lakh users in the coming years.

4. Turning point 1: Dropping the plan for PWA

First, we planned on building a PWA because it was easier to build than developing a native mobile app. Also, it works on iOS, Android, and the web. But as the notifications for PWA were not supported in iOS, we thought of using the WhatsApp messages for the daily reminders.

But as we researched the WhatsApp Business API pricing, it was charging per message and it was too expensive for our budget to scale this free app.

The daily reminder was an important feature so we shifted our mind to build a native mobile app and to use firebase cloud messaging for push notification which was free.

5. Turning point 2: Migrating from expo to react-native-cli

We choose react-native to build the app considering the skillset of the team and to maintain a single codebase of both iOS and Android.

We started building the initial designs of the screens using expo, which made the development and release a bit easier. But we observed the size of the app was larger than expected.

So we stopped using expo and started a new app with react native CLI and copied the few components we have created.

6. Optional signup and offline-first architecture

Making the signup as required added friction in the onboarding process, also some users might want to use the app without signing in. But without signup, the progress of prayers will be lost if users switch devices. So we took the approach of optional signup, ie, users can signup anytime they want and data will be backed up to the server after the signup.

Also, we don't want to show error messages when the device is offline and the users are trying to pray. So we choose an offline-first architecture, which allows the users to use the app even if it is offline and once the connection is back the changes will be synced with the server.

7. Adding a personal connection to the basic experience

The users can name each baby they adopt, also they will receive a unique hand-drawn image representing the baby.

Once the users finish milestones like completing a month of prayer they will be provided with reward images.

Adding these kinds of elements made the app more personal.

8. Unit testing for future dates

Most of the calculations in the app were related to date and time. Some features, like showing a “baby is born” banner after completion of a pregnancy period can only be tested in the real world after using the app for 280 days. So we wrote unit tests to simulate the time period and made sure the logic is correct.

Conclusion

These were some important things that happened on the product development side, but more importantly, there were a lot of prayers that worked behind these scenes which bound us together and made all these happen.