Civocracy: Our Case Study

The general idea behind this startup was to let people change and improve their communities by the power of their voices. The whole project was born as a website where residents of different cities across Europe can gather to solve their local problems. Moreover, it allows cities’ authorities to collect feedback on their project and find out whether they keep pace with citizens.

The decision-making process is simple as that: initiate a discussion regarding the topic of your interest ➡️ involve people from your neighborhood or city ➡️ share your thoughts, ideas & projects ➡️ find a consensus and embody it!

In this way, for example, local communities managed to transform the center of the Dutch town Losser or improve the biodiversity policy in the Noord-Holland province.

But where is our team in this story?

📋 What Was the Task?

When the Berlin startup firstly contacted us, the guys already had a fully-operational website. However, like many other web-based projects, the Civocracy team realized the importance of being present in the mobile world. One of the main goals was to turn an active participation of citizens in solving civil-problems into their habit. And it would be quite impossible without an app, right?

Also, having a mobile app was a part of arrangements between the Civocracy team and Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur in France. Therefore, we carried a double responsibility: to our customer and to their French partners.

Thus, our task was to build a prototype of the app that can be used later for further development.

So, after the first conversation with our client we’ve already grasped the concept and correctly defined the main aims of the project as well as the main challenges for us. These were:

We have already mentioned several times that the strict and close deadline was one of the challenges of this project. Yet, how much time did it take to deliver the Civocracy app-prototype? Take a look at the detailed timeline below!

🕰️ Timeline

Let’s run a small test. We’ve already described you the workflow and UI of the Civocracy app prototype developed by Stormotion. Try to guess, how many days our developer Alex spent to build it from scratch for iOS and Android, and put your number below:

So, it took us 19 days to build Civocracy for both Android & iOS platforms. What tech tools helped us during this process? That’s the next point of our case study!

⚙️ Tech Side of Development

Framework & SDKs

First and foremost, you are probably wondering how Alex managed to create the app for both platforms at once. A bit of development magic and… the use of the React Native framework. It allows writing JavaScript code that can be reused for both platforms and is working inside as native code (which gives the best UX, compared to other technologies). Finally, you just have to solve some platform-specific challenges so that your app works and looks like a native one on iOS and Android at the same time.

Libraries

Alex also used the following libraries during development:

• Lodash - a utility library that helps to work with objects, arrays, strings, numbers etc.
• Moment.js - to configure the countdown system.
• react-native-image-zoom-viewer - to allow the user interaction with the cover image.
• react-native-transition - to deliver smooth animations in the app.

💡 Summary

Finally, we managed to deliver a pixel-perfect prototype in just 19 days. Despite the project was pretty simple, with its help we managed to become even more experienced in:

• cross-platform React Native development services that allow to deliver an app for iOS & Android platforms almost simultaneously;
• working with hard deadlines.

Our Berlin partners were also satisfied with the final result. We wish Civocracy to succeed in involving citizens in the life of their community and looking forward to further cooperation!