Getting Started with Backbase iOS Development
Creating a real-world banking🏦 app is real challenge🎢 because it involves money💰 and their movement. You are going to make something that would help people check their account balance, shop online, transfer money to friends, get their KYC done and much more.
Things involved here are very critical, one-slight mistake in your app can lead to a big disaster💥 for bank and/or customer. Therefore it is not always ideal to start from scratch and get trap in long debug sessions. Today’s world demands a quicker⚡development cycle and with least errors and in our case no errors!
What is Backbase?
Backbase is an application development framework🗂 that helps us create cross platform banking apps flawlessly. It has got so many pre-backed 🧰 “Widgets” for us to use in development. It takes care of all major functionality and security for us. So, we developers are on a safe ride!
Before we start building basic apps ⚙️, let us understand the core feature of Backbase : It is Omni-channel framework. (Just to ensure we are on same page; In simple terms Framework means collection of functions/features that we can use to build something)
What is Omni-channel framework, wait!! First, what is omni-channel 🤔?
- Omni — many places;
- Channel — a medium for data transfer;
- Banking — services offered by bank; (depositing, saving, withdrawing money, etc.)
Backbase is omni-channel banking framework, by this it means that we can create cross-platform (Omni) applications which have the ability to cater same set of banking services at all these platforms (website 🖥, mobile📱, atms 🏧, etc.) using Backbase SDK (Software Development Kit : Collection of tools and instructions for creating applications).
A true omni-channel framework would also support start of service from one platform⏳ and it’s continuation on another platform⌛️ without re-supplying information to another platform for continuation. Real-time data synchronisation.
Why Omni-channel is good? 🌟
- Customers have better experience in using bank services. I mean, we don’t want to fire up laptop for checking bank balance every time, we would love to do that on our smart phone with single tap.
- Operational cost reduction. Since the information is synchronous across all the platforms we need not setup a different mechanism to keep track. Below example would help understand this.
For example : Traffic lights 🚦 are same for all kinds of road vehicles, rather it is a truck 🚛, car 🚙, bike 🚲, or bus 🚌; they all follow same traffic light. Had it been different traffic light for every kind of vehicle, it would get costly to set up and run all of them(🚦🚦🚦🚦..) in sync. Here Vehicles can be thought of as Different Platform Apps, Traffic light is Omni-channel (signaling all kinds of vehicles), and Road is the Banking service in use.
3. Attracts new customers. If bank A (🏦, 🖥, 📱)can offer services offline (at bank), Website, and Mobile; and bank B (🏦, 🖥) offer services at just bank and website, would’nt a new customer want to join bank A✨ for flexibility?
Mobile SDK 🧰 + 🛠
Backbase supports fully native apps. Although most often Backbase powered apps are collections of :
- Platforms specific native components (mainly for security and navigation)
- Reusable web-based widgets (for delivering actual app functionality)
Let’s talk about this “Re-usable web based widgets” a bit more. These can be custom-built or can be used from collection of pre-built widgets. They are typically divided into two types :
- Hybrid widget collection (retail banking widgets)
- Universal collection (content widgets)
We will get to understand these better when we actually use them to create apps. For now let’s talk about Manageability in Backbase apps.
Ok, we made a Backbase powered app! Now we want a change, how messy it can be? — Manageability ⛳️
We often have to go a lot bigger loop 🎢 to bring a new feature(change) to our app users. Make changes in code, test it, publish to app store, notify users.. oh boy! 🤯
What if i told you we can make changes in a “Visual Editor” 🎁and Bam! it is right there on user’s phones, without any hassle update cycle! 🎉
Backbase makes it real simple for us to bring change/modifications to our app with the help of tool called “Experience Manager”. Publishing content is a matter of clicking a button 🖲 and avoids requiring to wait for an app store to release the mobile app. Yes, it has a approval sort of functionality so you can avoid accidentally releasing new stuff!
Sometimes we want our app users to update app to continue usage because of a whole new Magical App Version we made. Well, I have got you Good News! Backbase lets developers mark a particular app version as obsolete and ask users to update for continuing usage.
Everything sounds great! Do I need to throw away my existing code to use Backbase?? — Extend & Build 📬
You are in here for crazy amount of Good news 🥮 ! Backbase positions itself as “3rd Party Package” 📬, it doesn’t come in between as a whole new layer between your app code (swift) and app platform (iOS).
You need not learn any new language, just get it installed as 3rd party package and you are in for a backbase ride to your “Existing app”. It gives you many features for giving native experience to users such as :
- Plugins — enabling web-based widgets talk to hardware components like Camera, GPS,..
- Navigation — for giving native like animations in navigation
- Preloading & retaining — enabling us to load content even before user request. Flawless data delivery
- Version Management — enabling us to recommend or force users to update app.
- Developer Tools — for debugging.
- and more…
I guess this article helped you gain confidence in learning Backbase and using it for developing applications. I will see you soon with next backbase hands-on development article.
