Why We Are Rebuilding Our Mobile App
Last quarter was an interesting one for our team. It’s always fun to look back at the end of each quarter and marvel at all the things we accomplished together. That’s easy to do when you’ve released a ton of fun new features, but for us… the 3rd quarter was different.
In the 3 years since Secure Data Kit was unveiled, we’ve grown substantially. We’ve grown up — we’re continuing to partner with some of the largest global healthcare organizations in the world! But we’ve also grown out — Secure Data Kit has spread out all around the world, and as of the end of Q3 2019 is being used in 63 countries. This presents a really interesting challenge for us as we attempt to juggle and prioritize the the needs of a really broad customer base. As you might imagine, our customers in Tanzania have very different requests than our customers in Bangladesh or Samoa. Working on a small and nimble team is really beneficial here, because we have the freedom and the flexibility to grow our product in a way that meets the needs of our customers in the some of the most remote parts of the world, after all that’s who we built this for. But as word has spread and more people have trusted Secure Data Kit as their data platform, we’ve had to move fast and (as the saying goes) break things. It became clear that the Secure Data Kit mobile apps in particular just weren’t built to handle this type of growth, so we had to do the hard thing — we decided to rebuild our apps.
Building a mobile app is a feat in and of itself, but re building is a whole other story. Our team has taken a critical look at their own code and decided together how to improve it for the benefit of our customers. It’s hard to look at your own work, pick it apart and improve it… which is part of why it’s been so cool to see this huge project come together so successfully. It’ll be released before we say goodbye to 2019, and we’re really excited to get this new stabilized app out in the world so our customers can have a more seamless experience with our platform as they’re out in the world transforming lives!
So, what can you expect to see in the re-release of the SDK app?
- Syncing your data from the field will be faster because we’re now using something fun called partial sync (read more about what that means in our roadmap).
- More customization options! Want to white-label the app (change the logos and colors) to match your organization? We’ll be able to do that by pulling just a few levers rather than releasing a totally separate app to the app store. This will allow you to take advantage of the constant improvements in the app but still have the feeling of an app built just for you!
- We’ll also be able to move faster when you request new features, because we’ve built the new app in a way that allows us to improve it in a more stable way. And to that end, we’ve got fun plans for new features coming by the end of the year (check out our roadmap for the specifics).
- …and more! You can look forward to the nitty gritty details when the app is ready!
Thanks again for joining us on our journey to build tools that help you transform lives with data!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
