Case study: Chptr
Mobile-first memorialization platform
- Mobile development
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Project information
Description
Mobile app for communities to gather, share and hold memories of a lost loved one’s life for generations to come.
Industry
Social
Client
Chptr
Clutch Review
5
Release
2022
The Client
Never gone
Chptr Founder and CEO, Rehan Choudhry, realized there was something else that we -as human beings- could do to cope and deal with when losing someone we love. He idealized a mobile app that could make it possible to share thoughts and immortalize what we want to remember about our loved ones.
After receiving the MVP, we knew we wanted to be part of this project, so we started developing an easy-to-use and accessible to all unique way to honor lives well lived.
Process and challenges
We needed to build an app that would allow people to join groups that pay tribute to someone they knew and lost. It had to work to be able to share images, videos, thoughts, information, and everything they needed to do to remember someone and honor their lives. We used Flutter to develop the app and led the project’s entire lifecycle.
Synergy
The first step was doing a lot of testing and feature development working simultaneously with Chptr Consulting CTO, Jake Spracher, who with his expertise and extraordinary career as an ex-Apple engineer, helped us with the procedure and organization of the project. We offer an incredibly committed and empathic team and set regular meetings while refining their product as a collective team.
Performance
Like with most social media apps, Chptr required a massive load of photos and videos as they are the heart of the app.
One of the biggest challenges we found working on this mobile application was to make it work fast and with a quick response despite its large amount of multimedia assets.
This was a high matter to the team considering the moving and difficult time the users are struggling with while starting to use the app. Everything needed to work smoothly and effectively.
Recognition
Product hunt is a web for product-loving enthusiasts to review new tech products where Chptr was voted 1st Product of the day, part of the Top #5 of the week, and named the #4 Community & Social app of the year by the Golden Kitty Awards.
How we did it
Research
There was an impressive teamwork effort in searching for the best services to handle large amounts of media, that had multiple features that needed to work simultaneously, multiple Spikes were carried out to find out which were most compatible and efficient.
Development
We put together our best practices to develop a scalable and powerful app. Some of those practices were unit and integration testing, code documentation, continuous integrations, deployment workflows, and features synchronization that were able to deliver thanks to the quality and integration in testing.
Launching
After weekly synchronization sessions and planifications of sprints with the whole team, the launching was managed in different stages to ensure we provided the Client and its users with a robust application that satisfied their expectations. The app was launched to the stores and rated five stars.
Flutter Development
We built Chptr using Flutter which allowed us to develop it for Android and iOS while at the same time working to reduce effort and costs for our client.
We also used many integrations like Mux for the videos, Firebase as backend serverless using many of its services, UxCam and Braze for user analytics, shakebugs to report bugs, among others.
Supporting the healing process
Chptr is the digital place to cope with the hardest part of our lives: saying goodbye to our loved ones. It is a useful tool for sharing what we want to remember about them. We can do it by safely storing memories like photos and videos, inviting friends to contribute to their stories, and discovering other Chptrs.
The app got up to 100 reviews on stores iOS, +500 downloads on Google Play and has over 1000 users.
"They were not an extension of our team, but rather a core part of our team from day one."
I don’t know what will happen next with our business but I do know that I am incredibly optimistic because of what the CreateThrive team built for us. Today our team gets to do what we love, helping people through their grief journeys, because the CreateThrive team took a chance on us. I’ll always be grateful for it.
