One Walk a Day
We’re living in weird times right now. The Add Jam team are all working remotely, but we still wanted to work together on an app project that would prove useful in the current climate. At the moment, we’re limited to one walk a day for the sake of our health and safety, and we all think it’s essential to take advantage of that when we can. Our team are all too used to working at a screen all day, so we’re well versed in the benefits of getting out for a bit of exercise where possible.
The Problem
Each country has had a different response to the global coronavirus pandemic, and whilst some are being very stringent in the way they document movement, we don’t have much in place here in the UK. China has a strict traffic light system based on QR codes, but this felt too invasive for us and isn’t an approach we’d like to see repeated here. In France, people have a card to fill out before leaving the house, and must present this to the police when asked.
Our Solution
We decided to create an app that would record our one walk a day, that resets each day. Our goal was to make it privacy focused, so that in the long-term it only stores the date the app was installed, to avoid people using multiple installs to circumvent the purpose.
The speed at which the team were able to develop was crucial for this, as we wanted to launch something as quickly as possible, without compromising on the quality. The nature of the current situation means that things are constantly changing, and it’s a growing issue that we’re all facing right here, right now. To facilitate this, we decided to utilise React Native for development, for the sake of speed and cross platform functionality.
To start with, we mocked up a handful of screens in Sketch. We wanted the app to look “native” on iOS, even though we were using React Native. We were aiming for a look and feel similar to that of recent Apple apps, like Apple Music, with a bold header and clear iconography. To further assist in speedy development, we utilised assets we already had to hand, like Font Awesome Pro.
Seeing as privacy was paramount, we made the decision not to include any third party trackers like analytics packages or crash reporting from services such as Firebase or Facebook. We’ve launched the app on iOS and it’s already gained traction with users logging their daily exercise.
What’s Next?
Whilst the main features are definitely complete, particularly on iOS, there are still some things we’d like to add. With the ever-changing nature of the pandemic, we’d look at adding a simple content management system to allow us to easily update the app content if the government advice changes.
Mobile apps lend themselves to the use of notifications, so we’d like to bring in push notifications for things like reminding users to log the end of their walk, or encouraging people to get outside for some exercise if they haven’t yet logged a walk that day.
We’re also working on shipping an Android version of the One Walk a Day app, but this is proving tricky. The Play Store is taking longer than usual to review apps, which is creating a delay. Adding to that is the fact that our Android devices are currently in the Add Jam office, but we’re not! An emulator can only do so much, and we really want to test it out on a device. We’ll possibly need to rope in some volunteers to help us with that for now.
All in all, for an app that we managed to pull together in the space of a day, we’re happy with it. Being able to react quickly to challenges and opportunities can make a huge difference to the flexibility of your business, so it’s always useful to practice with new projects.
What would you like to see added to an app like One Walk a Day? You can download the app on iOS here to give it a go for yourself.