iOS Sports App Development for Tennis Tournaments

Client

Digital services provider in the sports sector

Industry

Sports, Entertainment

Services

Mobile iOS app development

Tech

Swift, RxSwift, RxCocoa, Zeplin, MVVM, MVC, Xcode, WonderPush, Moya

Challenge

The client is an established player in sports-related digital services. They already had an app that covered tennis tournaments, enabling users to follow these events in real time. The solution was packed with robust functionality, from displaying players’ stats to purchasing tickets, and even ordering food. However, the application had severe issues. For starters, it was built on outdated technology — Objective-C. Additionally, the application’s performance was compromised. Its pages were slow to load, and the screen often froze when users switched from one setting to another. This hindered the overall user experience, leaving tennis fans frustrated. The client turned to ITRex app development company to fix these problems, modernize the app’s look and feel, and implement additional features ahead of a large tennis tournament.

Our task was to:

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Enrich the app with new functionality

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Update some of the existing features

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Rewrite parts of the app from Objective-C to Swift

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Optimize the app's performance

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Redesign the settings to ensure a smooth user experience

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Test the existing app to identify and eliminate any bugs

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Perform research to find out which technology/framework is the best fit for the client’s requirements and the existing app’s setup

Solution

Our team fully redesigned screen settings to improve user experience, make it easier to navigate the app and customize it. We implemented the following features from scratch:

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Dark mode feature, which enables the user to switch between dark and light modes from the app’s settings in real time, without having to go through the phone’s settings. As soon as the user changes the mode, the app’s appearance would adjust accordingly. This includes changing the images, texts, background colors, and even the integrated web view would adapt. This was tricky as we had to implement the dark mode feature in a way that would work not only on the more recent iOS versions but also on older versions, such as iOS 12 and earlier.

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Video splash feature, which turned static images on the app to animations using Firebase

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Podcast functionality, so that users could login and listen to podcasts while they continue navigating through the app.

Additionally, ITRex assisted the client with:

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Improving user onboarding-related functionality, including login, favorites list, and preferred settings

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Enhancing existing features, such as push notifications, and aggregating more statistical data that the client can analyze to understand how users deploy the app and which functionality they use the most

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Optimizing the app to eliminate freezes and minimize screen loading time. We used Xcode to monitor different parameters, such as how many requests the app sends to the server, its memory usage, any memory leaks, etc. looking for ways to enhance performance.

Impact

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Enabled the client to open another revenue stream thanks to sponsored podcasts

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The app became more user-friendly and its rating moved up to 4.6

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Thanks to our team’s optimization efforts, the software could handle more visitors simultaneously and sustain performance during large tennis games without any issues