An iOS mobile app that bolsters the Swedish real estate market
Booli is a Swedish real estate platform that enables browsing through housing offers from all over the country. This unique search engine aggregates housing adds and helps potential buyers and sellers learn all the useful information on the property.
The mobile app market grows insanely fast - this may sound obvious, but it is essential to recognize the need to go ‘mobile’ from the business point of view. Over 50% of the Swedish cell phone users have an iPhone in their pockets. That is why the Booli team contacted Appkit with an idea to create a perfect iOS version of their platform.
They genuinely care about the product, including both the quality of the code and the resulting app.
Challenge
Booli is using amazingly complex and reliable data set to provide its users with current prices, statistics, and price indicators. As a significant number of users have access to a vast amount of offers, creating a very stable app was crucial. It needed to work fast, be indefectible, and correctly connected with the map feature.
Additionally, the only language of the app is Swedish, so both teams needed to establish a perfect communication flow to ensure that the linguistic part of the app will be spot-on.
Solution
The Booli and the Appkit teams set up a face-to-face whole-day meeting to go through all the functionality needs and features ideas for the iOS app. The client presented the complete company overview and the specificity of their point of view on the Swedish real estate market. During the meeting, the product delivery methodology was discussed and chosen - both sides agreed on Scrum. The teams were having a daily stand up calls during which they discussed the progress of tasks planned for 2-week sprints.
Through the whole run of the project, the Booli team visited Bhubaneswar three times to meet with Appkit and discuss development progress and go through all the possible paths for app improvements. Additionally, Appkit visited the Swedish headquarters of the client to high-five the people with whom they were working remotely daily.
What makes Booli unique is that they have and still are collecting a massive amount of statistics and historical real estate data. The algorithms in the center of the app are incredibly complicated. That is why the mobile app needed to show on what indicators the property value is assessed and show it most intuitively. To answer this need, Appkit created a brand new iOS app. The iOS developers from the Appkit side cooperated closely with the Booli backend developer, designer, and Product Owner to create a stable and fast working product.
Outcome
The MVP version of the Booli app was made available in the AppStore in July 2018. Since then, Appkit maintains and develops the app. During the first 12 months of the project, five new versions were published, and over ten improvement iterations implemented to ensure the best working app possible.
After over a year in AppStore, the app was rated 4,4 / 5 by 6376 users and downloaded to 144 000 mobile devices! About 47 000 people use this version of Booli every month.