Category: Development

With the rise of cyberattacks, healthcare data security has become crucial for representatives operating in the niche. The safeguard measures must be applied to protect sensitive patient data from leakage, unauthorized data access, misuse, trade, or loss, as well as help a company to act ethically in the market and cultivate trust among the clients, boosting brand reputation, ensuring integrity, and improving medical care.

Key Elements of Personal Data Security in Healthcare

Taking robust security measures for healthcare organizations implies devising well-thought-out strategies that enhance key elements of data privacy and security in operational processes, communication, and data storage, collection, and usage. These include compliance with laws and regulations, regular training, incorporating algorithms for data protection inside the health information system, and technical upgrades to minimize risks of cyberattacks and security breaches.

Patient confidentiality and data protection

Patient confidentiality and data protection are not the only principles of ethical behavior that encourage organizations and individuals to keep their client’s sensitive information safe and use it only for legitimate and authorized purposes. They are also standards mandated by laws like HIPAA, CAN-SPAM ACT, General Data Protection Regulation, and others for creating honest communication and improving treatment and patient care.

Compliance with Health Data Standards and Regulations

For many reasons, compliance with Health Data Standards and Regulations for privacy and security is a must-step for organizations. First, when meeting them, companies demonstrate their commitment to honest and trustworthy client relationships. Second, they promote secure connection and communication. Third, they fight cyberattacks and criminals. Finally, they avoid penalties and other repercussions.

Technical measures to mitigate risks

Risk management strategies counter emerging concerns in the healthcare sector. They help companies ensure data security using the latest technologies, minimize risks of attacks and accidents, and provide patients with a safe environment. Generally, they include education and training, risk identification, prioritization, assessment and monitoring, streamlined reporting, communication plan, introducing patient data security protocols, following the best practices, and devising a contingency plan.

Regular security training

Regular security training is one of the best practices that healthcare organizations might follow. Timely education that fosters a security-conscious culture and highlights the importance of data security helps employees across all departments understand the consequences of misuse of sensitive data stored, respect patients, recognize threats, avoid cyberattacks, and minimize the risks of data leakages or mistreatment.

Common Healthcare Data Security Challenges

The sanctity of confidentiality between patient and doctor comes with numerous challenges in the digital age, where communication is done through multiple means. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services emphasizes many problems in the sector, including outdated medical hardware and software, disconnected healthcare systems, and vast amounts of data to store and handle. However, the most critical issues for companies are the complexity of healthcare IT systems, the rise of cyber threats, and manmade accidents.

The complexity of the healthcare IT environment

Many reasons cause the complexity of the healthcare IT environment. It could be a wide range of tasks that personnel should undertake, like analyzing patient records and data from diagnosis and treatments, administrative duties, data sharing, and entry, or the absence of unified space that provides seamless access to electronic health records (EHRs), laboratory information systems (LIS), or pharmacy management systems.

The constant evolution of cyber threats

Medical data often contains financial details, making it a “tidbit” for criminals in the black markets of the dark web, who subsequently use it for identity theft and fraud. Cyberattacks alone accounted for 734 large data breaches last year, costing the industry millions.

The human factor

The role of human factors in managing security risks is hard to underestimate. Manmade accidents stand behind the majority of data breaches. Medical personnel’s unawareness of data privacy and storage risks and misusage of patient data regularly violate laws and regulations and make the IT system vulnerable to malicious actors.

HIPAA and HITRUST: Why Compliance is So Critical for Healthcare Organizations

The healthcare sector is protected by two general laws: HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and HITRUST. They urge medical organizations and vendors to protect patient information from unauthorized access and misuse. Violating these regulations leads to drastic repercussions, starting with hefty fines and ending with imprisonment for those responsible for data security issues.

Healthcare Data Security Best Practices

The healthcare industry has become increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to its growing complexity, decentralization system, and lack of proper training that educates medical personnel about security measures and acts. Healthcare organizations must follow these best practices to mitigate the risks and ensure a safe environment.

Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

RBAC is one of the most popular practices in the healthcare industry to eliminate security issues, safeguard patient healthcare information, and ensure the integrity of data storage, access, entry, and usage. It offers a structured approach to defining roles for medical personnel and everyone involved in treatment and client communications, like administrators or stakeholders, to manage permissions and enforce policies and regulation compliances.

Monitor and Audit Access Logs

Monitoring and auditing access logs, as well as scanning data from unauthorized access, is a fundamental procedure that underlies many IT systems across niches. Primarily, it is responsible for on-time troubleshooting, spotting suspicious behavior that compromises data integrity, and reducing the risk of data stored misuse. It provides detailed reports and identifies weaknesses that may lead to breaches or system errors.

Encrypt Data In Transit and At Rest

Encryption is arguably one of the most popular, reliable, and time-proven ways to protect data in transit and at rest. Making personal information, financial records, and intellectual property unreadable to unauthorized parties without a decryption key, it meets regulations and ensures safety and integrity even when the data is stolen.

Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Multi-factor authentication is a well-known yet effective practice that requires multiple verification methods empowered by security solutions. Apart from passwords, it may ask for second and even third pieces of sensitive patient information to verify a user’s identity, such as a code sent to a mobile device or a biometric scan. This procedure dramatically enhances security by protecting against compromised passwords and minimizing phishing attacks.

Regularly Update and Patch Systems

Regularly updating hardware and software allows companies to patch bugs and glitches, which cause system crashes and incremental vulnerabilities because of the misconduct behavior of users or malicious actors who are getting more sophisticated in their attacks. This optimization step leads to better data protection and improvement of the overall system’s performance and level of security.

Educate and Train Staff

Human error is a common cause of data exposure that creates opportunities for malicious actors to perform successful cyberattacks. The best way to minimize the risk of data breaches and other drastic scenarios is to educate and train employees to identify threats, prevent mistakes, and spot suspicious activity that compromises system security.

Develop a Comprehensive Incident Response Plan

Known as IRP, it is a crucial data security solution that allows companies to increase their chances of avoiding the aftermath of data breaches and malicious attacks. This well-thought-out strategy outlines procedures that the personnel must follow to react quickly, eradicate the root cause efficiently, and ensure swift recovery from incidents.

Ensure Compliance with Regulations

Ensuring compliance with regulations is not just professional advice; it is the obligation every healthcare organization must meet to continue its legal activity in the sector. From enforcing multi-factor authentication to regular employee training, all these recommendations help companies to work legitimately in the niche, protect healthcare data, and establish a safe environment for patients.

Vendor Risk Management

The healthcare sector does not exist in a vacuum—every organization partners with third-party vendors to ensure the best treatment and communication with clients. Identifying and minimizing risks with providers and operations in the supply chain helps to manage processes, protect data, optimize costs, and meet regulations.

Continuous Security Assessment

Monitoring against threats using continuous security assessment and tracking tools is one of the best professional recommendations. Introducing an ongoing monitoring system in your technical environment that consistently surveys for security vulnerabilities is a fool-proof way to catch bugs, fight malicious activity, and keep data safe, secure, and intact. It also helps organizations comply with the laws and security regulations.

Healthcare Data Security Trends to Know in 2025

The healthcare sector is known to have the most difficult challenges caused by numerous interconnected aspects, starting with a human factor that accounts for most data security incidents and ending with complicated, outdated, and decentralized information systems.

However, this does not mean it cannot mitigate its incremental vulnerabilities and minimize the risks of cyberattacks and system crashes. One of the best ways to do this is to follow the trends and introduce those that fit their technical environment, requirements, and goals. Here are the top ones that healthcare professionals and vendors should adopt in 2025.

• Employ AI and advanced machine learning algorithms to detect unauthorized access and fortify data security.
  
• Conduct proactive compliance checks and automated monitoring to locate and fix inconsistencies to meet healthcare data security standards, such as HIPAA and HITECH.
  
• Promote regular training and educating staff on data necessary to establish a security framework and avoid healthcare data breaches.
  
• Pay attention to external partnerships by auditing vendor security protocols through professional tools or agencies.
  
• Embrace multi-device connection yet combine applications and desktop programs into a centralized platform.
  
• Use top-notch health information technology designed specifically to create a robust security framework and protect sensitive patient information.

Conclusion

The healthcare industry is infamous for its constant data breaches. It remains the prime target for cyberattacks like phishing, malware, and ransomware due to its direct and constantly compromised access to medical records and sensitive patient data like banking accounts, email addresses, etc. Recent surveys indicate that at least 500 records are exposed daily due to human factors, outdated software, or a growing attack surface.

On top of that, as the niche that collects, stores, and uses sensitive health information through electronic health records, healthcare institutions must meet standards and obey the laws and regulations to ensure a safe environment, ethical behavior, and avoidance of fines, work restrictions, and even imprisonment.

This makes data security critical for every industry representative, starting with small third-party vendors and ending with hospitals. Many measures can be taken to improve the situation. This includes the implementation of up-to-date healthcare data security solutions, multi-factor authentication, data encryption, AI monitoring, vendor risk management, devising strong security strategies, analyzing data from cyber threats, educating staff, and following and adopting data security trends and new methods.

FAQ:

Why is data security crucial in the healthcare industry?

Data security is crucial in the healthcare industry for many reasons. It protects patient’s sensitive personal and financial data from being compromised and used in malicious activity. It creates a safe environment that promotes better treatment and recovery. Finally, it helps many healthcare providers obey laws and regulations to work in the industry legitimately and avoid fines and imprisonment.

What are the top methods for ensuring data security in healthcare?

The top methods for ensuring data security in the healthcare industry are data encryption in transit and at rest, multi-factor authentication and role-based access control, continuous security assessment, vendor risk management, educating and training staff, monitoring and auditing access logs, staying compliant with the law and regulations, devising comprehensive incident response plan and regularly updating and patching systems to eliminate bugs and crashes.

What are the biggest challenges healthcare providers face in securing data?

Among the biggest challenges that healthcare organizations face in securing data are the growing attack surface, the uprise of cyber activity including malware, ransomware, and phishing, outdated medical hardware and software, legacy systems, human factor, lack of proper education and training, third-party vendors, and low expertise in the security measures.

What are the benefits of implementing robust data security in healthcare?

The benefits of implementing and regularly updating data security measures in the healthcare sector are creating a safe environment that encourages open and transparent communication and ipso facto faster recovery or effective treatment, minimizing risks of cyber-attacks, maintaining integrity, accuracy, and confidentiality of patient’s data, building trust and credibility in the community, and reinforcing brand’s image and reputation.

How can healthcare organizations stay updated on the latest data security and privacy practices?

Staying informed about the latest data security practices does not require special skills but time and research. Companies should regularly monitor expert websites dedicated to cybersecurity, laws and regulations, and professional networks and communities. It would also help to attend seminars and conferences and invest in training and education.

Let’s imagine that you recently released your app MVP and now you want to enrich it with additional functionality such as geolocation, social media login, and a list of recipes. Should your app developer build all those features from scratch? Well, no, because you can enrich your app functionality using a thousand ready-made APIs (application programming interface), provided by different services. 

If you want to find out more about API for third party integration, and the benefits they bring to your business, read on. In this article, we also highlight the most popular APIs for mobile apps and give a handy guide with API integration steps. 

What is the 3rd party API?

When you come to a restaurant and want to order, you need a waiter who will deliver your order to the kitchen and bring it to your table. In this case, API performs as a waiter. It sends the request from your mobile app to a third-party APIs system and delivers the result back to your app.  

Also known as an application programming interface, API is a defined method of communication between various software components with a set of subroutine definitions, tools, and protocols that allow your mobile app to borrow functionality and data from other apps or services. 

[Secure API for mobile apps work process]

A 3rd party API consists of three main components: 

• Client, or in other words system that sends the request to the server 
• The server might be the computer or database that responds to the request

MONOLITHIC VS MICROSERVICES: CHOOSING THE ARCHITECTURE FOR YOUR BUSINESS APP

Most of our clients use mobile API integration over developing features from scratch due to the following reasons: 

• Fewer costs. Since your app can use functions of other applications, your development team needs less time to build an app with comprehensive features, which reduces the cost of development and time to market.  
• More value. By providing app users with advanced features, third-party API integration might become your app USP (unique selling proposition) and help your app to stand out from the crowd.  
• Convenient app. APIs make your app easily accessible via channels your app users interact with. By using APIs by Facebook for social media sites login, Google Maps API for determining geolocation, or Paypal API for paying for an order, you make your app even more convenient to users, thus increasing their engagement. 
• Business ensigns. Make better data-driven decisions for your app functionality via analytics components such as usage patterns, device types, and geographical locations. Such insights are particularly useful for businesses that launched app MVP and are looking for ideas on app usability. 

If you are ready to receive all these benefits, the first thing to do is to select which type of action API your app should perform, i.e., use case. 

Three main API use cases

The integrated third party APIs could perform the following actions: 

Using other services features

One example is apps that use PayPal’s Braintree API as the payment gateway or our project Spotnews, an app with integrated Spotify API allowing users to listen to music while reading news. For more information, read our case study. 

Receiving other’s services information

For instance, by integrating New York’s subway system API, you can provide your app users with real-time travel data, like the schedule of trains, arrival, and departure.

UBER API INTEGRATION: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE 

Getting access to mobile app device functions

Examples of such third party API integration are apps like Snapchat and Instagram which use the phone’s camera API to take pictures. At the same time, Google Maps can define the user’s location by using the phone’s geolocation API. 

In a nutshell, by using third party API, you can add new features to your app, get access to other services data or mobile device features, without spending a fortune on developing those features from scratch.

Third-party API examples

To give you an idea of what features you can integrate into your app, we have built a third party API list for business apps and their features. 

• Google Maps API is a must for any navigation or geolocation mobile apps since it shows maps and driving directions so your app users don’t get lost. 
• Facebook API is the social network API integration we use for our projects most often since it allows authorizing new app users via their existing Facebook profile; thus, users avoid filling in long registry forms. 
• Skyscanner API might be helpful if you want to create a travel mobile app and provide users with flight search, ticket prices, and live quotes from ticketing agencies.
• Booking API will add such information to your mobile app as accommodation queries, facilities, prices, and other info from hotels around the world.  
• Spoonacular API with recipes, food, and nutrition is a must for diet and fitness apps since it includes over 365,000 recipes and 86,000 food products. Also, your app users can calculate the number of calories in each meal, convert ingredients, find recipes to meet special diets, and so on. 
• Movie Database API will work great if you consider developing an on-demand video streaming platform like Netflix. Such an API provides access to movie titles, IMDB rating, runtime, release date, awards, plot, and lots of other data for each title. 
• Uber API will allow your app users to hail an Uber taxi via your app, pay for a drive in-app, and leave reviews. 

If you have selected API for your mobile app, let’s find out how you can do that. 

9 ALTERNATIVE ANDROID APP STORES

How to do API integration to your mobile app

So, what is third-party API integration? Let’s find out. Being responsible for different actions, functions, and information, every time, the third-party API has its own methods of integration. Here, we highlight the essential API integration patterns. 

Step 1. Hire an API integration developer

If you are not a tech person, to integrate an API to your app you will need to hire a mobile app developer. For this task, a mobile development specialist will use an SDK (software development kit) that includes a bunch of software development tools in one installable package. In this way, the developer will correctly integrate the selected API. 

Step 2. Create the project within the API provider system 

A mobile app developer should register in the API provider system because every call to the third-party APIs endpoint requires authentication. 

ANDROID APPS VS. IOS APPS – WHAT AND WHY IS BETTER?

Step 3. Receive API key and authorization token 

After registration, the developer gets an API key so the API provider system can identify the calling project and authentication token to verify that the calling user has access to make this request.

Step 4. Integrate the API framework for the app 

Now the developer installs the selected SDK with APIs to an app build environment using dependency managers such as CocoaPods for iOS and Maven for Android apps. 

Step 5. Use API request instances and methods

To make the app use new features integrated via API, the mobile developer will implement new functionality using dependencies added during the previous step.  

[API integration step-by-step process]

Such integration may take the developer from 8 to 16+ hours and cost from $800 to 2k+. 

Conclusion

By using third-party API integrations you can enrich your mobile app functionality without reinventing the wheel (Facebook, Google Maps, Paypal, online games etc.). Such an integration significantly reduces the cost and time of the app development process, while making your app to stand out from the crowd and increase user engagement. 

What our clients say

Mobile app vs mobile website: It is a big decision that many business operators are making as they struggle to determine what method is the best way to reach out to, connect with, and serve their customers.

One of the most important things that impact this choice: cost-efficiency. There are other factors to consider when making a comparison between app or website setup that may be overwhelming for a business owner who simply wants to connect with his or her target audience.

In our article below, we’ll talk about the differences and unique features associated with a mobile app and a mobile website. Armed with this information, you will be able to answer the question: “Is it better to use an app or website for my business?”. You may even find that it might be good to develop both a mobile app and mobile website to reach your customers and give them easy access to your products and/or services.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO DEVELOP AN APP: DETAILED FEATURE BREAKDOWN

The major difference between a mobile app and a mobile website is that the mobile website is accessed by the user via the Internet (therefore requires being online) and the downloadable application is a separate app installed on the phone and can be accessed both online as well as offline. To create such mobile apps or websites, we suggest outsourcing an app development company.  

While both options have some remarkable visual similarities, there are some major differences in terms of features, the purpose of the app/website, budget factors, and the size of the audience you can reach with each option.

WHAT TECH STACK TO CHOOSE FOR YOUR PROJECT

What is the Difference Between an App and a Mobile Website?

Let’s talk about definitions:

• A mobile website is a website for the design of which has been scaled and optimized for mobile devices. Typically, it features smaller fonts, fewer page elements, and less white space (compared to traditional desktop versions.)
• The mobile app is a separate program stored locally on your phone that uses the device’s hardware and software features and usually creates a better, more intuitive, and faster user experience.

The main question you need to answer: what do you want it to do? What actions do you expect your mobile app or mobile website to perform?

• Want your users to be able to read your website on their mobile devices? Choose a mobile website.
• Want to raise brand awareness? Use a mobile app.
• Don’t need any special features, mainly content-oriented? A mobile website.
• Want to make videos or integrate the app with the device’s hardware? Use a mobile app.

A mobile app is available to the user through a downloadable file either from various Android app stores or the Apple store. Once downloaded, the app installs on the person’s device automatically and doesn’t need the use of a mobile browser to access the content.

At the APP Solutions, we recommend creating native mobile apps, i.e. the app is designed for one platform: Android vs iOS (or, if you’re creative, BlackBerry). Yet, you can also create a cross-platform app that would work with more than one operating system.

HOW TO MAKE AN APP: LIFE CYCLE OF MOBILE DEVELOPMENT

A mobile app may offer content to the user that is downloaded onto the mobile device in its entirety or it may pull some material from the Internet while the app is in use. (Keep in mind that the latter case would require the user to have an active Internet connection.)

Mobile websites are not downloaded but are something a person can access using a browser to view content online. A mobile website is basically your usual website (that people access via desktops) but the design is adapted so that the user can easily navigate the website using touch and all elements would be of adequate size on a smaller screen. If accessing the Internet with a mobile device, the user will need a 3G, 4G, or WiFi connection and an Internet service provider.

HOW TO OUTSOURCE MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT

So what is the difference between a mobile website and a regular one? Simple: The mobile website is created so that it presents on a mobile device with the appropriate size and resolution graphics. Just like a traditional website, a mobile website is entirely capable of displaying video, images, data, and content. The mobile site can even access click to call and mapping (based on Google maps) mobile features.

Mobile App or Website: Which One Should You Use?

Your goals will ultimately define whether you want to use a mobile website, a native app, or both. For example, consider a game app like angry birds: The app is entirely downloadable and can be installed on a mobile device. If you plan to develop mobile games, mobile app users can download is your best bet.

In contrast, if you have a website online already, you may want a mobile website to act like your existing website and even duplicate the content you offer online. You can offer content that is mobile friendly without having to have an entire app coded for the purposes of doing so.

KOTLIN VS. JAVA: WHAT TO CHOOSE FOR AN ANDROID APP?

Of course, there are situations where you will find you can benefit from both options. This option is ideal if you have a website before you get a mobile app. For the most part, the most logical order of things when it comes to establishing your mobile/online presence is that you have a mobile web presentation first.

Then, you can offer a mobile app as a secondary, useful application your customers can use for specific purposes that one might not otherwise be able to complete through a traditional Internet browser (for example, if your project requires recording a video, therefore needing a camera and microphone access – which, for example, mobile Safari doesn’t allow.)

Native Apps and Mobile Website Benefits Comparison

Native apps and mobile websites each have their own set of advantages. In fact, a mobile website has several inherent benefits when compared to native apps:

• You get a greater outreach
• They are ideal for public communications and marketing endeavors
• They cost less than a mobile app
• They offer greater device compatibility (because you only need a working browser and Internet connection)

When it comes to mobile websites, there is no waiting to gain access to content, product, or service information. In today’s culture, where it is just as hard to get the attention of a web user as it is to keep the user engaged, immediate website access is really preferred. With mobile websites, the user does not have to take the time to download or install anything, and while most mobile downloads take mere minutes, in those few minutes you still run the risk of losing the interest of the user downloading a mobile app.

What’s more, you do not have to worry about having separate mobile apps so users of different devices can access the mobile website. Whether the user has Blackberry, Android, or iPhone, as long as the user has a browser on their phone, they can view your mobile content.

READ ALSO: Mobile App UX  

Upgrading a mobile website is something that can be done with immediacy, as you can make your website changes and then publish the content. When it comes to upgrading a mobile app, you will have to make updates to the application and push the new updates to users so they can download it before such updates become useful.

Granted, that’s all nice in case you simply need a copy of your usual website for people to access on their phones (which, in our day and age, is sort of a must.) When you need more complicated things and you have greater plans for your app than simply copy the content on your website, a standalone mobile app is a way to go.

FUNCTIONAL VS NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS: MAIN DIFFERENCES & EXAMPLES

Mainly, it’s all about user experience (UX). Whatever you do, think of your user and his/her journey through your website or app. For example, your website might present general information about your project and your app will be tracking the person’s running workouts or streamlining the shopping process in your eCommerce business.

We hope this was helpful to you. In case you have more questions, ask away in the contact form and we’ll be glad to help you with choosing the best option for your web browser or mobile project.

The emergence of cloud computing and the adoption of cloud architecture for software applications was a game-changer. It introduced so-called microservices to the fold and allowed to streamline the development process to a more focused and productive state. 

At the same time, “microservices” are among the most overused buzzwords in tech blogging throughout the majority of  IT-industries. The use of the word without rhyme or reason creates a lot of confusion.

The goal of this article is to clarify a few things. In particular:

• What is a Microservice Architecture?
• What kind of multiple services use it?
• What are the benefits and disadvantages of MA?
• The requirements for microservice architecture.

What are microservices?

Microservice architecture is a type of system infrastructure that presents an application as a framework of services designed for specific operations. 

The concept of microservices originates from the single responsibility principle. It goes like this: 

• “To gather together those things that change for the same reason, and separate those things that change for different reasons.”

In essence, microservices architecture takes services that do one thing well and orchestrate them into a loose framework. 

• The application is like a LEGO construction kit, a collection of modules. 
• Each existing service is doing its part for business goals. 
• The parts contribute to the whole, and together they form a service. 

The services are tied together by the API (aka application program interface) that provides interaction between system components. This approach enables relative independence of the services from each other, which significantly simplifies its development and maintenance.

• Microservice architecture is the preferable choice in cases where your crucial requirement of the system is agility and scalability.

How to define microservice?

Application decomposition is a significant chunk of work in determining the structure of microservices. There are three commonly used approaches to this task:

• Decomposition according to the business’ capabilities (aka actions of the business operation that generate value. For example, ERP for resource management and allocation, etc.). In this case, each microservice handles a specific element of business operation.
• Decomposition by use case – i.e., microservices handle specific actions. For example, Amazon uses a specialized microservice to process shipping orders. 
• Decomposition by resources – in this case, microservice covers all operations of a specific field. For example, Spotify uses microservice for user account management. This approach allows them to implement personalization features deeper and keeps user data safe from breaches.

How to maintain data consistency?

Another significant challenge is maintaining the consistency of data over numerous microservices.

Here’s why:

• In the microservice architecture configuration, each service operates with its own database. The databases then synchronize during the operation. 
• The system requires a more flexible approach to keeping track of data transformation to keep data consistent through and through.  
• One of the viable solutions can be the Saga pattern. Here’s how it works:
• Every time service transforms data – an even is published.
• The other services in the framework take notice and update their databases. 

5 examples of microservice architecture in real-life applications 

Walmart

Walmart switched to microservice architecture in 2012 after a string of system issues during seasonal peaks of customer activity. 

The system could not handle the workload. This issue resulted in a decrease in revenue. 

After this, Walmart made a complete overhaul of its system and re-platformed core business tasks to microservices. This approach allowed to redistribute the workload, and at the same time, streamline the workflow of the system. In turn, this enabled further refinement of the framework.

The results of the transition to  microservices are staggering:

• Hardware costs dropped by 20-50% because of the architecture switch.
• In addition to this, the system used 40% less computing power than previously.
• The system avoids downtime during seasonal peaks of customer activity (as on Black Friday and the likes);
• Microservice architecture enabled full use of mobile applications which added another stream of orders, and thus increased overall amounts of conversions.

Spotify 

Spotify is another prominent example of using microservices to build an efficient system and avoid the challenges of monolithic complex systems. 

At the moment, Spotify has over 75 million active users per month. That’s quite a scope to scale. 

• These users don’t want to think about the service, so the goal is to make the customer experience seamless.

Here’s how Spotify handles it:

• The system is broken down into self-contained single-purpose microservices with autonomous development teams
• Each microservice deals with a specific goal. For example, a search engine, user behavioral analytics for recommendation engine and autogenerated playlists, content tagging, and so on. 
• Because of their isolated nature, these services are less dependent on one another. As a result, customer service is consistent, and the company can continuously refine it without putting the service down. 
• In addition to this, any emerging issue is contained within a specific service and doesn’t affect the rest.

Read also: How to Build a Music App Like Spotify

Paypal

Microservices architecture is a perfect fit for payment processing. Workflow is structured, and you don’t need to bend over backward to connect the parts of the workflow. 

As a payment processor, Paypal’s scope of operation and customer demand is immense. The service needs to be scalable to handle the load properly. In addition to consistent service, the company needs to provide a decent customer experience. It is a challenge considering the scope of operation.

Paypal is using the Node.js environment to run virtual machines that distribute the workload and deliver consistent service. As a result, the system can handle over a billion hits a day without breaking a sweat. 

Amazon 

Amazon has the most interesting microservice use case because of its sheer scope. 

Let’s take a look at the eCommerce Amazon application.

• The service encompasses multiple operations with high workload requirements. There are personalization, notification, search features, price optimization, advertisements, and other features at play. All of them manage the proceedings through APIs. 

The microservice approach allows handling each feature with a dedicated team with its own workflows. Because of this, the decision-making process for each feature is streamlined, and the speed of delivery is significantly faster. 

Just think about it, the company can make over 50 million deployments a year with no downturn for customers.

PassportScan

PassportScan is using microservice architecture to handle different aspects of the operation and keep the workflow smooth and sound. 

Microservices cover the following elements: 

• User account management
• Data storage for sensitive information
• Booking component
• Payment component
• Image recognition 

This approach allows structuring data and keeping it safe every step of the way. There is never confusion over the sequence of actions, and this contributes to higher productivity of the workflow. 

(If you want to read more about this project – check out our case study)

Benefits and challenges of using the microservice architecture

Benefits

• One of the preeminent features of microservices is that they are small. Microservice does one thing, so the amount of code to go through is relatively low, which is a blessing for a developer because it takes much less time to understand a small application than to get into a sprawling system. 
• As a result, the workflow in the integrated development environment is much faster and more productive. In addition to that, the lesser scope helps to avoid numerous human errors and subsequent bug hunts.
• Because of its isolated nature, the microservice architecture allows us to break down of the project team into multiple autonomous units. Each unit develops, tests, deploys, and scales its piece of the application. Because of this, the overall progression of the project is much faster. 
• In addition to that, the isolated nature of microservices makes it easier to fix any emerging issues. For example, you’ve got a memory leak. In the case of monolithic architecture, that situation might bring down the whole system. On the other hand, with microservice architecture, the issue is isolated to a particular service and doesn’t affect the others (albeit it disrupts the workflow).
• The other great feature of microservice architecture is a relative lack of dependence on the overarching tech stack. Each microservice uses its own technology stack, and it does not affect the other parts of the system. On the one hand, this gives enough room for experiments and innovation. On the other hand, it allows teams whatever they need to do the job. 
• From a business standpoint, the main benefit of applying microservice architecture is enabling continuous delivery. Since the application is broken down into specialized components – it is much easier to work on the specific moving parts without disrupting the overall workflow of the app. In other words, an application is up all the time and evolves on the go.
• As a result, it is much easier to maintain the application. Instead of handling an extensive system where each element depends on the other, and even the smallest change can create some issues – you manage a constellation of small self-contained services.  
• Since the system is easier to maintain – it is also much easier to test. The microservice application requires fewer resources and goes through the testing sequences in a shorter time frame, which then contributes to the overall pace of the development cycle.
• Because of this, deployment of the system becomes much simpler and less worrisome. The services are deployed independently of each other, therefore, any emerging issue is solved without affecting the overall system. 

Challenges 

Despite all the benefits that microservice architecture can offer, there are also a couple of significant challenges that come with it. 

Let’s take a closer look at them:

• While microservices themselves are small and self-contained, the connections between them create a complex distributed system, which requires a significant effort for optimization. 
• Because of this, overall deployment grows in complexity. The number of moving parts in the system increases its operational complexity. This feature makes deployment much harder, as developers need to manage numerous self-contained services and their cooperation.
• Developers need to implement communication mechanisms between the services and handle partial failures with the involvement of developers from different services. 
• The complex structure of the system makes the testing process much more difficult and time-consuming. This is especially the case with the testing of different interactions between services.
• The implementation of multi-service requests requires precise coordination and transparent communication of development teams. In other words, everybody needs to be on the same page at all times. 

Conclusion

Microservice architecture is quickly becoming a preferred way of building applications throughout industries. 

It is a much more flexible and cheaper method of developing an application that can grow and evolve with the business’ requirements while delivering consistent customer service. 

Imagine that you want to build a house. It should be two-stored, have a red roof, and several windows. But what about the number of rooms, the color of the walls and the style of the house? Should it be mid-century modern or even Scandinavian? You need to clarify many aspects to make the result meet your requirements.

The same applies to mobile app development. A detailed vision of the project helps business analysts and project managers create better product documentation in the short term. On another hand, if the team needs to clarify information during the development stage, development time and costs might increase, as well as the probability that the project may fail.

How can you avoid this?

Simply by defining functional and non-functional requirements for the project. While functional requirements might be quite clear, some of the non-functional requirements are hard to specify.

For instance: 

How do we know what acceptable “performance” should look like?

Or

How can we define “maintainability” before any code has been written?

If you want to decrease the project’s cost, increase the development of team productivity, and develop a successful and cost-effective project, read on.

Below, we share information on what requirements you need to clarify with a business analyst, functional and nonfunctional requirement examples, and handy tips on how to specify non-functional requirements.

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How requirements impact the software development process?

As mentioned, clearly defined requirements are the key to project success. These requirements also help the development team and client to ensure they are working to reach the same goals. Failing to define requirements may cause miscommunication between the team and client, and increase the chances of the project failing.   

But wait – there’s more:

• 68% of projects with effective communication, and precise requirements, are likely to deliver project scope and meet quality standards successfully.
• At the same time, 32% of IT projects failed due to sparse estimation during the planning phase and unclear requirements.
• Besides, unclear requirements increase the project timeline and budget up to 60%.
• Also, unclear requirements consume over 41% of the IT development budget for software, staff, and external professional services.

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Detailed functional and nonfunctional requirements in software engineering help the team to complete the following tasks:

Define the terms and roles. Requirements help to ensure that the development team and stakeholders are on the same page to avoid misunderstandings in the future.

Reduce communication time. Close cooperation with BA ensures much clearer requirements and less development time. Such an approach reduces the time required for communication during the development stage, as well as the project’s cost.

Make the project estimation more precise. Detailed requirements help us to estimate the development time and cost more accurately.

See the possible mistakes beforehand. When the team visualizes the project details during the discovery (inception) phase, they may identify errors in the initial stage of development. Therefore, they save your time and budget.

Create more predictable projects. High-quality requirements and wireframes help to predict the result and develop the project that meets your expectations.

To conclude, detailed requirements help developers and stakeholders to find a common language, save money and time for development, as well as create a project that meets business needs and expectations.

Now we’ll move on and learn more about project requirement types.

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Classification of requirements

To turn your business idea into a working solution, you need to clarify the following:

Business requirements include high-level statements of goals, objectives, and needs of your project.

Stakeholder requirements help to find what you expect from a particular solution.

Solution requirements describe the product characteristics that will meet your expectations and business needs. They include:

• Functional requirements describe ways a product must behave
• Nonfunctional requirements, also known as quality attributes, describe the general software characteristics

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Functional Vs Non-Functional Requirements: The Comparison Table

If you still have a question about  the difference between functional and non-functional requirements, check the table below:

Parameters	Functional Requirement	Non-Functional Requirement
Requirement	It is mandatory	It is non-mandatory
Capturing type	It is captured in the use case.	It is captured as a quality attribute.
End-result	Product feature	Product properties
Capturing	Easy to capture	Hard to capture
Objective	Helps you verify the functionality of the software.	Helps you to verify the performance of the software.
Area of focus	Focuses on user requirement	Concentrates on the user’s expectation and experience.
Documentation	Describe what the product does	Describes how the product works
Product Info	Product Features	Product Properties

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Functional requirements

Such requirements describe system behavior under specific conditions and include the product features and functions which web & app developers must add to the solution. Such requirements should be precise both for the development team and stakeholders.

The list of examples of functional requirements includes:

• Business Rules
• Transaction corrections, adjustments, and cancellations
• Administrative functions
• Authentication
• Authorization levels
• Audit Tracking
• External Interfaces
• Certification Requirements
• Reporting Requirements
• Historical Data

If your team uses Agile methodology, they will design most of the requirements in written form. Still, to present some requirements more clearly, the team can visualize them.

The functional requirements may appear in the following forms: 

Functional requirements specification document

The documentation includes detailed descriptions of the product’s functions and capabilities. These could be a single functional requirements document or other documents, such as user stories and use cases.

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As well as the form, the specification document must consist of the following sections:

Purpose. This section includes background, definitions, and system overview.

Overall description. The description document consists of product vision, business rules, and assumptions.

Specific requirements. The requirements might be database requirements, system attributes, and functional requirements.

Here is a project definition example:

“Admin dashboard – a web portal allowing Admin to view and manage Applicants and Customers, Drivers, vehicles, manage car models, prices, and review statistics from both mobile platforms.”

Use cases 

Use cases describe the interaction between the system and external users that leads to achieving particular goals.

Each use case includes three main elements:

• Actors are the users who will interact with your product.

Example:

 “Applicant – a person who wants to use the App and applies for registration.

Customer – a person who was approved for registration and can use the App.  

Driver – a person, who was registered in the Driver app and fulfills ride orders for

Members received from the App.”

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• System functional requirements describe the intended behavior of the product.

Example:

“Payment System charges Customer for the ride.”

• Goals describe all interactions between the users and the system.

Example:

“When the journey is over, Driver marks it has ended in their app.”

User stories

User stories are documented descriptions of software features from the end-user perspective. The document describes scenarios of how the user engages with the solution.

Example:

“As a Customer, I want to select a car from the carousel so that I can complete the order. ”.

If the development team uses Agile methodology, they will organize user stories in a backlog, an ordered list of product functions.

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Functional decomposition

A functional decomposition or work breakdown structure (WBS) illustrates how complex processes and features break into simpler components. By using the WBS approach, the team can analyze each part of the project while capturing the full project picture.

Example:

Image source: Batimes

Mobile app prototypes

By using prototypes, stakeholders and teams clarify the project vision and complicated areas of products in development. The development team also uses prototypes to represent how the solution will work and give examples of how users will interact with it.

There are two types of prototypes:

• Throwaway prototypes that can be cheap and fast visual representations of requirements

Image source: Justuxdesign

• Evolutionary prototypes, more complex ones, that can later even become the early versions of the product or the MVP.

Image source: The App Solutions

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Non-functional requirements examples

What is a non-functional requirement? 

The definition of non-functional requirements is quality attributes that describe ways your product should behave. The list of basic non-functional requirements includes:

Usability

Usability is the degree of ease with which the user will interact with your products to achieve required goals effectively and efficiently.

Legal or Regulatory Requirements

Legal or regulatory requirements describe product adherence to laws. If your product violates these regulations, it may result in legal punishment, including federal fines.

For example,  look at legal requirements for our recent project, a mobile taxi platform:

“To operate in London, the platform should be licensed by the local transport authority – Transport for London.”

Reliability

Such a metric shows the possibility of your solution to fail. To achieve high reliability, your team should eliminate all bugs that may influence the code safety and issues with system components. 

Performance

Performance describes how your solution behaves when users interact with it in various scenarios. Poor performance may lead to a negative user experience and jeopardize system safety.

Example: 

“The application shows cars nearby for three seconds.”

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As we said, some non-functional requirements are not so distinct and might be missed by the team and stakeholders due to:

Subjective nature. Different users can view, interpret, and evaluate Nonfunctional characteristics in different ways.

Integrated nature. The goals of one non-functional requirement may conflict with another since they typically have a broad effect on systems.

Don’t know what they [NFRs] are. Unclear terminology, confusing definitions, and the absence of a universally accepted classification scheme make understanding of non-functional requirements a challenge.

Assuming that “Everybody knows.” During the discovery (inception) phase, both the client and the team might forget about some non-functional requirements because some of them are hard to define from the perspective of a business idea. Therefore, they might arise only after the project release.

Still, non-functional requirements mark the difference between a development project’s success and its failure.

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How to define non-functional requirements

To determine the majority of non-functional requirements, you should:

• Use a defined classification and classify them into three groups: operation, revision, and transition. In this way, the stakeholders and the development team build a consistent language for discussing non-functional needs.

• With a list of pre-defined elicitation questions, you may increase the development teams productivity. Besides, you can save time when preparing for elicitation interviews and workshops. 
• Engage with the development team during the requirements definition to ensure that you are on the same page with the development team.

• Use ‘Invented Wheels’ and reuse the requirements written for other systems, since software systems have a lot in common when comparing nonfunctional requirements.

• Use automated testing tools such as Selenium, TestComplete, and Appium. Such tools will help to check your product performance faster and reveal more non-functional requirements.

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Final words

Precise functional and non-functional requirements are essential to reduce development costs because, when the requirements are clear, the team can develop the project much faster. The difference between functional and non-functional requirements is as follows: 

Functional requirements are easy to define because the business idea drives them. They include all the features of your future project and the ways users engage with it.

Experience drives Non-functional requirements.  In order, to identify them, you need to analyze the product’s performance and make it convenient and useful. Such requirements may appear when the product is being used on a regular basis.

In this way, while functional requirements describe what the system does, non-functional requirements describe how the system works.  

To receive assistance from business analysts and define your project requirements, contact us.

What our clients say 

Every person has some kind of attitude towards things he experiences. We can like this handwritten notes feature in the smartphone but can’t stand the whole noise meter shebang. And there is also this face-lock thing that really puzzles us. It is a natural thing…

All this says something about an object in question. And since this thing can be used by many people – there are dozens of such opinions from many people. When combined all these opinions paint a distinct picture of how the particular product is perceived.

That’s sentiment analysis in a nutshell.

In this article, we will look at what is sentiment analysis and how it can be used for the benefit of your company.

What is the Sentiment Analysis? Ultimate Definition

Sentiment analysis is one of the Natural Language Processing fields, dedicated to the exploration of subjective opinions or feelings collected from various sources about a particular subject. 

In more strict business terms, it can be summarized as: 

• Sentiment Analysis is a set of tools to identify and extract opinions and use them for the benefit of the business operation 

Such algorithms dig deep into the text and find the stuff that points out the attitude towards the product in general or its specific element.

In other words, opinion mining and sentiment analysis mean an opportunity to explore the mindset of the audience members and study the state of the product from the opposite point of view. This makes sentiment analysis a great tool for:

• expanded product analytics
• market research
• reputation management
• precision targeting
• marketing analysis
• public relations (PR)
• product reviews
• net promoter scoring
• product feedback
• customer service

How does Sentiment Analysis work?

Sentiment analysis is a predominantly classification algorithm aimed at finding an opinionated point of view and its disposition and highlighting the information of particular interest in the process.

What is an “opinion” in sentiment analysis? You all know the general definition of opinion: “a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.”

Well, from the data science standpoint, an opinion is much more than this:  

• On the one hand, it is a subjective assessment of something based on personal empirical experience. It is partially rooted in objective facts and partly ruled by emotions.
• On the other hand, an opinion can be interpreted as a sort of dimension in the data regarding a particular subject. It is a set of signifiers that in combination present a point of view, i.e., aspect for the particular issue. Think about it as if it was one of the rings of Saturn.

With that in mind, Sentiment Analysis is applied for the following operations:

• Find and extract the opinionated data (aka sentiment data) on a specific platform (customer support, reviews, etc.)
• Determine its polarity (positive or negative)
• Define the subject matter (what is being talked about in general and specifically)
• Identify the opinion holder (on its own and in correlation with the existing audience segments)

Depending on the purpose, sentiment analysis algorithm can be used at the following scopes:

• Document-level – for the entire text.
• Sentence-level – obtains the sentiment of a single sentence.
• Sub-sentence level – obtains the sentiment of sub-expressions within a sentence.

Given its subjective matter, mining an opinion is a tricky affair. Opinions differ. Some are more valuable than others. Four subcategories further characterize an opinion:

• The direct opinion is the one that directly states something. For example, “the responsiveness of the buttons in application X is poor.” Here you have a legit point.
• Comparative Opinion is the one where X is compared with Y based on specific criteria. For example, “the responsiveness of the button in application X is worse than in application Y.” In addition to being an insight into your product, it also serves as micro competitive research.
• The explicit opinion is where everything is clearly defined. For example, “this chair is rocking.”
• Implicit opinions are implied but not clearly stated. For example, “the app started lagging in two days.” It is important to note that implicit opinions may also have idioms and metaphors, which complicates the sentiment analysis process.

Why Sentiment Analysis Matters?

Sentiment Analysis deals with the perception of the product and understanding of the market through the lens of sentiment data.

There are many sources of public and private information out of which you can harness an insight into the customer’s perception of the product and general market situation. To name a few:

• Customer support correspondence (regarding your product)
• User-generated Product reviews
• Professional product reviews (as in The Verge or Wired)
• Social Media tractions
• General and special-purpose forums

Customer Sentiment Analysis can help make sense out of these hoards of data and transform it into:

• a clearly defined view on what certain segments of the customers think about the product or in general
• A deep dive into the state of the market from the consumer’s standpoint.

In both cases, it is an influential factor in formulating and elaborating the value proposition for a specific audience segment.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the section and take a closer look at how helps with understanding the market and understanding of the product:

• As one of the key performance indicators – the right kind of perception is strategically vital for the further evolution of the product. Often, sentiment tracking is a decisive factor in choosing the direction of the marketing efforts and business development, and it is crucial to know for sure what the score is. Sentiment analysis marketing gives you an opportunity to pinpoint the strong and weak points of the product from the consumer’s point of view.
• In the case of market research, the role of sentiment analysis is less integral but influential nonetheless. It gives another perspective, adds additional colors to the picture of the market, and lets you look at the situation from the ground level. And this lets you find one or two untapped leeways that will help to find a niche and establish the product on the market.

While on the initials stages these activities are relatively easy to handle with basic solutions – at some point, it starts to make sense to use more elaborate tools and extract more sophisticated insights.

Types of Sentiment Analysis

To understand how to apply sentiment analysis in the context of your business operation – you need to understand its different types.

In this section, we will look at the main types of sentiment analysis.

1st type. Fine-grained Sentiment Analysis involves determining the polarity of the opinion. It can be a simple binary positive/negative sentiment differentiation. This type can also go into the higher specification (for example, very positive, positive, neutral, negative, very negative), depending on the use case (for example, as in five-star Amazon reviews).

2nd type. Emotion detection is used to identify signs of specific emotional states presented in the text. Usually, there is a combination of lexicons and machine learning algorithms that determine what is what and why.

3rd type. Aspect-based sentiment analysis goes deeper. Its purpose is to identify an opinion regarding a specific element of the product. For example, the brightness of the flashlight in the smartphone. The aspect-based analysis is commonly used in product analytics to keep an eye on how the product is perceived and what are the strong and weak points from the customer’s point of view.

4th type. Intent Analysis is all about the action. Its purpose is to determine what kind of intention is expressed in the message. It is commonly used in customer support systems to streamline the workflow.

See also: Why Business Applies Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis Algorithms

There are two major Sentiment Analysis methods. Let’s look at both.

Rule-based approach

Rule-based sentiment analysis is based on an algorithm with a clearly defined description of an opinion to identify. Includes identify subjectivity, polarity, or the subject of opinion.

The rule-based approach involves a basic Natural Language Processing routine. It involves the following operations with the text corpus:

• Stemming
• Tokenization
• Part of speech tagging
• Parsing
• Lexicon analysis (depending on the relevant context)

Here’s how it works:

• There are two lists of words. One of them includes only the positive ones, the other includes negatives.
• The algorithm goes through the text, finds the words that match the criteria.
• After that, the algorithm calculates which type of words is more prevalent in the text. If there are more positive words, then the text is deemed to have a positive polarity.

The thing with rule-based algorithms is that while it delivers some sort of results – it lacks flexibility and precision that would make them truly usable. For instance, the rule-based approach doesn’t take the context into account. However, it can be used for general purposes of determining the tone of the messages, which may come in handy for customer support.

These days, rule-based sentiment analysis is commonly used to lay the groundwork for the subsequent implementation and training of the machine learning solution.

Automatic Sentiment Analysis

While the rule-based approach is more of a toy than a real tool, automated sentiment analysis is the real deal. It is the one approach that truly digs into the text and delivers the goods. Instead of clearly defined rules – this type of sentiment analysis uses machine learning to figure out the gist of the message.

Because of that, the precision and accuracy of the operation drastically increase and you can process the information on numerous criteria without getting too complicated.

In essence, the automatic approach involves supervised machine learning classification algorithms. In fact, sentiment analysis is one of the more sophisticated examples of how to use classification to maximum effect. In addition to that, unsupervised machine learning algorithms are used to explore data.

Overall, Sentiment analysis may involve the following types of classification algorithms:

• Linear Regression
• Naive Bayes
• Support Vector Machines
• RNN derivatives LSTM and GRU.

Sentiment Analysis Challenges

If there is one thing for sure, it is that sentiments are tricky beasts.

On the surface, it seems like a routine extraction of the particular insight. But in reality, the sentiment extraction requires a bit of heavy lifting in order to really get the gist of it.

In this section, we will discuss the most common challenges that occur during the sentiment analysis operation.

Context and Polarity definition

Context is the thing that often stings perfectly fine sentiment mining operation right in the eye. While a human being is able to get the context without much of an effort – things are very different from the algorithm’s perspective.

The thing is – Algorithms can’t guess what they need to do in order to get the right results. They need to be configured to get the right results.

Because of that, the sentiment analysis model must contain an additional component that would tackle the context of the message.

The key is in the text vectorization that maps out the connections of the words in the text and their relations to each other in terms of parts of speech.

This gives an additional dimension to the text sentiment analysis and paves the wave for a proper understanding of the tone and mode of the message. Tools like word2vec and doc2vec can do this with ease.

Subjectivity and Tone determination

The identification of the tone of the message is one of the fundamental features of the sentiment analysis.

Overall, the tonality is relatively easy to calculate out of the message via the verbiage. Words like “nice” and “ugly” directly state the score.

The harder task is to determine whether the message is objective or subjective.

People tend to formulate the message in a variety of ways. Sometimes the message does not contain the explicit sentiment, sometimes the implicit sentiment is not what it seems.

The only solution for that is deeper and more varied verbiage in the NLP sentiment analysis model applied for the sentiment analysis.

You need to take into account various options regarding the characterization of the product and group them into relevant categories. This way, the algorithm would be able to correctly determine subjectivity and its correlation with the tone.

Irony and Sarcasm identification

Among all the things sentiment analysis algorithms have troubles with – determining an irony and sarcasm is probably the most meddlesome.

Why? Let’s call it The Treachery of Language.

You see – the way we use language is often subtly subversive. The words on their own might be a bunch of teddy bears, but the context they are used in can turn them into pink elephants on parade.

The algorithm does not get it. They make jokes and snarks at face value and classifies them as a moderately negative sentiment or an overwhelmingly positive one. Even messier is the differentiation between irony and sarcasm.

The secret of successfully tackling this issue is in deep context analysis and diverse corpus used to train the NLP sentiment analysis model.

Defining a Neutral Tone

Determining tonality can be hard enough due to contextual peculiarities and irony/sarcasm contamination.

And then there is a neutral tone.

What is a neutral tone? It is a type of tone that doesn’t contain any signifiers that can be classified as either positive or negative. Instead, a neutral message just states some facts.

How to deal with neutral messages? There are two ways.

First, you need to take a look at the context and see which facts are stated. That makes all the difference and takes the lid off the unexpressed opinion. But this approach is manual and can be applied in special cases only.

The second is for the algorithm. Neutral tone can be calculated out of what it is not i.e. polar message. Basically, you tag as neutral everything which cannot be identified as positive, negative, or its variations.

In Conclusion

Sentiment analysis is an incredibly valuable technology for businesses because it allows getting realistic feedback from your customers in an unbiased (or less biassed) way. Done right, it can be a great value-added to your systems, apps, or web projects. 

From a business perspective, the niche of social media is one of the most promising markets. Of course, this segment is densely occupied with dominant players, but the rapid development of technology is continually opening up new opportunities for the realization of new ideas.

The first social media site goes back to the 1970s, back when the University of Illinois has developed the PLATO System, which had such features as online forums, bulletin boards, instant messaging, and many other features. 

We have thousands of social media platforms to choose from (with key leaders like Facebook or Twitter). According to App Annie Report Social Media Network Statistics, The social media platform statistics show the following leaders in various countries:

Canada	US	UK	France	Germany
WhatsApp Messenger	Snapchat	WhatsApp Messenger	Snapchat	WhatsApp Messenger
Snapchat	Facebook	Snapchat	WhatsApp Messenger	Snapchat
Instagram	Instagram	Instagram	Instagram	Instagram
Facebook	Facebook Messenger	Facebook	Facebook	Facebook
Facebook Messenger	Pinterest	Facebook Messenger	Facebook Messenger	Facebook Messenger

VIDEO STREAMING APP PROOF OF CONCEPT

More recent statistics in global terms present such results:

When creating social media, it is necessary to understand that having a mobile application is a prerequisite for a successful project. Also, when we talk about the costs, you should keep in mind that most of the time and cost are related to the backend (what happens in the shadows and makes the app/web project work).

Social networks app development can be provided from scratch or as an add-on to the existing web version. At The APP Solutions, we can work with either option, since we have experience with coming into the development process at any project lifecycle stage. 

Check out the infographic to find out how much does social media app development cost (basic functionality and one platform – Android or iOS):

FUNCTIONAL VS NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS: MAIN DIFFERENCES & EXAMPLES

How to Create a Social Media App

1. Connecting with existing social media networks

The fewer steps separate the user from the full-fledged interaction with an application, the better. They have already left their details in a ton of other social media apps; there is no need to force them to do it again. It is better to cut down the way to the new experience to one button “Connect with” or “Login using” one of the existing apps.

2. Opportunities for self-expression

Every user wants to feel unique and to show the world how creative, extraordinary, and outside-the-box he is. Social media app should include some features that can help with this like customizing profile pictures, backgrounds, nicknames, etc.

3. Creating a network

Any social media makes sense for the user only if there are his friends or interesting people. Therefore, social media app developers should work through the perfect algorithm of friends graph and the system that lets to invite friends with one click.

4. Arranging the newsfeed

Nearly every social network requires news feeds. Content is the king, and rightly so. Users generate an enormous amount of data themselves: check-ins, statuses, video, audio, and photo uploads. Even more, they share someone else’s content. It makes it possible to assert themselves and express their opinion (which is one of the benefits of social media – you can make yourself be heard.)

When we start to develop a social media app for Android and iOS, we take this into account and offer the arranging the news feed that best fits the specificity of the social media app.

[Newsfeed of All Square Portfolio app project by The App Solutions]

5. Interaction with other services

To give your customers a better user experience interacting with the platform, you have to create a system for integrating existing services into your network. This way, users don’t have to choose among numerous services because they are already interconnected. Speaking of third-party services, we are referring to:

• Relationship networks

  Networks are used to build communication between people. There are several categories: personal networking (Facebook),  professional networking (Linkedin), and dating services (Badoo or Tinder app).

• Media sharing networks

  This type of social media gives users the opportunity to exchange video and photo content. These include Flickr, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Snapchat. A distinctive feature is the scaling of content. For instance, some offer to publish short videos; others allow creating their own video channel.

• Online reviews

  These social media are a huge base of data that helps users to gather all the necessary information to make purchasing decisions. For example, Yelp and Urbanspoon are based on geolocation and the ability to leave comments and recommendations on local businesses.

• Discussion forums

  Communities, forums, Q&A-services are some of the first forms of social media. Modern representatives of this type include Quora, Reddit, and Digg. At the core mechanics of the interaction between users is the need for knowledge sharing.

• Social publishing platforms

  This type of social media service related to blogging and micro-blogging platforms where users create and publish text and media content. These include such popular platforms as Twitter, Medium, and Tumblr.

• Bookmarking sites

  StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Flipboard are services where the user collects the content in the personal library, which can be followed by other members of the community. Typically, these social media study interests to offer more relevant content.

• Interest-based networks

  The most attractive opportunity that provides social networks is to find like-minded people with similar interests. For example, Last.FM is a network for music lovers, Goodreads is for lovers of literature.

  It should also be considered the option of integrating your service in all existing networks so that publications of users in your social media app could be cross-posted to other social networks. It will bring a user`s friends to your social network.

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6. Private communication

No matter how thrilling is the experience of public user interaction, there are always things that need to be discussed privately. Social networking apps should contain built-in services for secure private communication. This way, your users will not go to third-party resources and will spend more time on your application. Read our article to know why data privacy matters.

So you have an app idea, you have an understanding of the essentials of the app. What’s next? How to make a social media app? We proceed to the direct creation of applications.

The APP Solutions is a social media app development company that sticks to native app development. It allows us to get a higher performance of the new social app on Android and iOS, ensures a better UI/UX, and gives full access to the built-in services of the mobile device.

Secondly, when working on such a large-scale project, our social media app developers offer to start with the MVP or minimum viable product. MVP is a product with a minimum core set of functionality that quickly lets to send the product to the market to test the idea. This approach helps to announce the product rapidly, while dramatically saving time and money. Once validation is finished, we start to finalize the product: add features, and design, improve UI/UX. After this, the application is available in the market for another cycle of validation and testing.

MVP Scheme Stages of Development

Five Steps of Social Media Application Development

At the APP Solutions, our professional team we have adopted a workflow that makes the most sense from the technological and business points of view and we follow these critical phases in creating a successful social media app. 

Step 1. Creating a strategy for your social media

At this stage, we thoroughly study the idea and the competitive field, analyze the requirements, draw up a portrait of the target audience, and establish the key performance indicators that are to be achieved. All this helps to find a unique niche while developing a social media app for mobile.

Step 2. Design the social network App’s workflow

The design itself consists of several steps:

• Sketching

  Very quick basic outlines of future applications. They help assess the future logic of the project, the number of screens, and the interaction between them.

• Wireframing

  It is one of the most important steps of a design process as it helps the development team to visualize the skeletal structure of social media applications. It gives a structured view of the app and the experience that will get the end-user.

• Prototyping

  A created prototype is a working model of a future application. It provides both for the customer and for developers a better understanding of the product. It is much easier to edit an idea and bring changes to it before the coding process is started.

• Design App Skins

  At this stage, we convert wireframes in the social app design. We are carefully studying existing solutions, watching the latest trends, and elaborating UI/UX to provide the best of possible solutions.

Step 3. Development & Quality Assurance for iOS and Android

The development and design processes usually run together in the life cycle of a social media mobile app. When the prototyping of the app is done, we build its back-end by setting up servers, databases, APIs, and working out perfect storage solutions. 

We deliver a product that meets all technical requirements, user guidelines, and platform standards. Our iOS and Android engineers recommend our clients native social media app development to get better performance of the application.

(You can calculate the development cost online using our cost calculator.)

At every stage of development, we provide manual and automatic testing of every part of the program and their correct interaction in the program. (By the way, testing is not simply done to make sure the developers didn’t write any errors into the code, but to test the UX of the project.)

Related reading: 

Case Study: Video Streaming App Proof of Concept

Step 4. Publishing & Marketing the App

Our professional team also ensures the process of publishing, creates all promotional materials including screens, video guides, and an effective description of the application. All this helps social apps for businesses to stand out at the Apple Store and Google Play Market.

Also, about marketing. When you come up with an idea for a mobile app or a web project, remember that the development costs are only a part of the project cost. You should also take into account basic marketing needs and costs. What way to choose in promoting your own app is up to you, but don’t just start thinking about it AFTER your app is in the app store. Don’t forget to track quantitative metrics for the application, which is essential for your success in the social media market.

Step 5. Maintenance & Support

After the project is released to the application markets, we ensure our clients with all types of support and updates implementation.

Quantitative Metrics for Social Media Application

For business analysis of social media mobile app, we highly recommend sticking to the metrics that grant tracking engagement and help to make actionable solutions.

We can divide them into five groups: financial, user, acquisition, sales, and marketing. Depending on the type and purpose of the application, there is always a unique number of instruments. But here are some essential ones:

Acquisition: CPI & CAC

Cost Per Install (CPI) is calculated by tracking installs of users that came from advertising. It is counted by dividing advertising costs by the number of application installs.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the sum of the total amount of all marketing efforts that are needed to attract a client. It is one of the determining factors that show if the company has a viable business model. This indicator of business scaling possibilities.

User activation

Active users in comparison to downloads. Activation actions/parameters are customized for each app.

User Retention and Churn rate

User retention is measured as a proportion of users who returned to the app based on the date of their first visit. If the new update is released, it is crucial to check if retention has changed, because it helps to find out what is working and what is not in the new version.

The churn rate shows the number of customers who have stopped using the social media mobile app. The less it shows, the better.

User engagement

User engagement is a number of target actions that are taken in the app. Among them are Session Length and Interval.

The first one shows the time between the user who entered the application and left it, the second demonstrates the time between two sessions.

Traction

It is quantitative evidence of the market demand for the product. In other words, it shows patterns of the month-to-month growth of users.

Burn rate

The amount of money the mobile app is consuming (burning) each month like server costs, marketing, staff, etc. It shows a number of the necessary resources at the disposal that is required to plan further growth and fundraising.

How to Make a Social Media App

Social media app development is no easy task. But we do believe that good ideas, our experience, and a strong professional team of social media makers are enough to create a successful project that would reach your business goals and bring truly loyal users. This is the answer to the question: “How to create a social media app?”.

What our clients say 

Augmented Reality technology had come a long way since it was first introduced. The term “Augmented Reality” itself was coined by Tom Caudell, one of the Boeing researchers, in 1990. Before that, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality did not have a clear distinction. In the ’00s, things began to change rapidly – we see more and more businesses taking advantage of the new tech.

With the introduction and adoption of smartphones and later introduction of Hololens and Oculus Rift, Augmented Reality technology that once seemed a thing of the somewhat distant future became feasible and started to evolve. It took some time to get a grasp on fundamentals but now the development of an augmented reality application is not much of a problem – just a matter of figuring out what’s and why’s.

At the moment, there are very enthusiastic forecasts that show figures as high as $108 billion by 2021 and $162 billion by 2024 for the Virtual reality & Augmented Reality industry’s market value.

If we take a look at the current year statistics and forecast of AR revenues from 2018 to 2020, we can see that AR Services are projected to rise exponentially next year:

[Source: Statista]

However, it doesn’t mean that everything is unicorns and rainbows are everywhere in the Augmented Reality industry. Far from it. In this article, we will talk about the challenges the Augmented Reality industry is currently facing.

Augmented Reality Industry Challenges

Lack of Proven Business Models

One of the weirdest things about Augmented Reality technology is that despite experiencing broad adoption and mass public acceptance – it is not doing all that well business-wise.

Let me explain – the industry is doing fine. There is a steady flow of investments in the augmented reality app market, and the general background is more than positive. However, all these investments are yet to pay off big time. Part of the reason is that no one had figured a distinct AR-related Business Model that will work long-term (besides, probably, gaming industry.)

Sure, startups are popping up like mushrooms after the rain with more and more outlandish concepts at hand and many big companies are trying out various AR-related solutions, but there is one thing that should be noted – all these solutions are integrated into the business models that can be effective with or without an AR solution.

The biggest AR product of recent times – Pokemon Go broke even only because of the power of the brand. After the hype died down, the retention rate followed. The same goes for IKEA and Amazon AR applications – they are fun, but you can live without them. 

However, there is a ray of light in the form of industrial companies. Why? They have enough financial resources to boost development, and there are plenty of fields where AR technology might come at handy.

Let’s name a few:

• Proof of Concept for construction projects;
• Discrepancy Checking;
• Construction Progress Monitoring;
• Hidden infrastructure visualization;
• Maintenance Instructions;

These kinds of applications have the potential to establish an augmented reality technology not as a toy but as a viable helping tool that improves the overall quality of the end product.

Lack of Augmented Reality App Design & Development Standards

Standards are something of a universal language for a software application. It is one of the ways to secure its compatibility and contribution to the overall development of the technology. At the moment, this is the thing that is under construction for Augmented Reality.

The reason is simple – it’s too soon. The technology is too new, and it is still coming to its own both in hardware and software terms (despite “technically” being around for a while.)

So what’s the problem? Without standards, every augmented reality-related project is a thing of its own barely compatible with the others. That complicates the process of unifying solutions to the greater whole which makes the overall development of the technology much slower than it could have been if everyone had been on the same page.

However, implementation of technical standards is a question of time, and its adoption will signify the final stage of establishing the technology as a real deal. 

Security & Privacy Issues with Augmented Reality

Privacy & Security also pose significant challenges that the AR industry. Due to inconsistencies in augmented reality programming, oversight, and negligence, there is a legitimate chance of getting into trouble without meaning to do so.

The biggest issue is that no actual regulation designates what is allowed and what is not in the augmented reality environment. This means the technology can be used with malicious intent just as it can be used for entertainment.

For example, the “try before you buy” option for clothing, but instead of overlaying the cloth on your body someone may overlay another nude body and spread to damage your reputation or blackmail. Or AR can be used to hijack accounts via surveillance and mining data output by slightly manipulating and overlaying AR content (just as in ad stacking fraud schemes).

Part of the problem is a lack of awareness about these problems. People don’t understand how sensitive the subject is. The other part of the problem is the reluctance of the developers to take action before there is any heat on the corner.

The Possibility of Physical Harm

While long-term effects of using Augmented reality are much better documented than ones for Virtual Reality (uh-hm), there is still a significant possibility of harming yourself and the surroundings due to the nature of the application and lack of attention.

The thing is – Augmented Reality operates in the real world and adds a little bit of digital into it. These elements are driving attention away from reality which may cause a potentially dangerous situation.

For example, remember all the news about people hurting themselves while playing Pokemon Go? Well, it is just the tip of an iceberg.

Augmented Reality, while being a worthwhile addition to the proceedings, can also serve as a significant distracting factor. This is why automobile manufacturers are so reluctant with implementing AR displays – it is more of a liability than the actual advantage for the driving process.  

As such, there is a need to develop a certain kind of AR interface that will be useful and yet not distracting from the process.

Poor Quality of Content & Use Cases

While AR technology is rapidly developing and gradually expanding its scope – the problem with its use cases and the content remains. It is currently leading the top of unsolved problems in augmented reality in terms of being threatening to derail an industry.

The majority of AR-related content available at App Stores is mostly a showcase of simple tricks and not much else. Its goal is to present some brands as forward-looking and cunning. It is designed to be a one-off affair.

Sure, AR technology is still in its infancy, but if you look at what things augmented reality development companies are trying to pull off with more or less the same tools (all HoloLens or Google Cardboard projects related to Healthcare or Education) – the solutions above seem a bit lacking.

Part of the reason for this problem is because of a lack of expertise in the field. There are not enough developers who have a firm grasp on technology and can deliver an accessible and useful experience.

The other big problem looming over the AR industry is the lack of credible use cases for AR technology. At the moment, the majority of AR apps are one-trick ponies that can do one thing which can be done without their assistance with the same level of effectiveness.

Augmented Reality is an additional element to other activities by design – it must significantly contribute to the process either by providing additional information more conveniently or providing assistance in performing specific actions.

Part of the reason why it is so is that of the very nature of AR – it is an addition, augmentation of the other thing, and the only way for it to be successful is to be a natural extension that makes the overall activity easier and more effective, which comes with tries and fails.

AR displays for cars seems like a good idea on paper, but not a useful solution in practice. On the other hand, AR in medical or engineering training can be very helpful. The same goes for infrastructure planning and on-set simulations.

Social Issues of Augmented Reality: Public Acceptance & Retention

While Augmented Reality seems to be a relatively popular topic in the media and frequently mentioned as one of the most exciting emerging technology – its overall public reception is, for the lack of a better word, mild.

Part of the reason for that is that the quality of the majority of AR content is mostly hit and miss. Out of this comes the notion that AR applications are nothing more than an unnecessary addition. However, the situation will probably revert with a couple of “killer apps” that will prove the worth of technology in one swift sweep.

The other part of the problem is that the public, for the most part, is not aware of the benefits of augmented reality in various fields. It is still perceived as zany science fiction by a significant portion of potential users.

Then there is a retention problem. Despite the popularity of the Augmented Reality technology steadily growing over the past few years, there is still a significant problem in keeping an audience using Augmented Reality applications in a long-term perspective.

The current state of affairs with AR apps looks like this: users download the app because they saw an advert that excited them uses it a couple of times until the goal is realized or interest is satisfied and then abandon the app due to lack of long-term use cases.

Augmented Reality Technology Problems & Limitations

Another big problem with implementing AR solutions is the technological gap between AR devices. It is one thing to design an app for a fully-fledged AR gear, and it is a completely different thing to do it for a smartphone. The latter case got many limitations that make the whole experience not really user-friendly and somewhat redundant to the activity it augments.

Considering that the majority of the target audience will not likely purchase AR gear due to its impractical and high prices – smartphones remain a preferred function and since they have certain augmented reality app design limitations – it neuters the whole point of implementing AR solution to the mix.

What’s the solution to this problem? It is a question of time when the price for AR gear will drop to a mass consumer acceptable level. The thing is – Augmented Reality Technology is in its early stages, and it is too soon to expect that its gear will be available for a regular Joe from the get-go.

Ethical and Legal Issues with Augmented Reality

With high power comes great responsibility and AR is such a power. While it is fantastic that you can easily navigate through the streets using your augmented reality app, public spaces become a sort of “hijacked.” Remember the Pokemon Go and the rather sensitive story about people going to the Holocaust Museum to catch “that one pokemon” they need for the collection?

It is also important to remember that when people are using augmented reality apps, they are sort of “located” in two worlds – one real and another virtual. Therefore, as we mentioned above, you should beware of where you’re located in the physical world, making sure you’re not about to cross a busy road with your nose in the cell phone or wander into someone’s private land (and get a fine, in the best-case scenario.) 

* * *

We developed our own AR Navigation app – AR Places Map. It is designed specifically to simplify movement in the city and navigate in the different leisure opportunities. 

Features include:

• Locations of interest (restaurants, cafes, and other points of interest) on the map and in Augmented Reality mode
• Information about restaurants, art galleries, parks, and more
• Navigation and direction to the points of interest

* * *

In Conclusion

While the list of aforementioned AR-related challenges may seem intimidating and off-putting – there is nothing to worry to about for the Augmented Reality technology. It has proven its capabilities of expanding user experience and making it more convenient.

The solution of these challenges is more of a question of time than anything else, and it is certain that AR technology will find its footing and establish itself on its terms very soon.

Rapid Application Development or RAD model is one of the approaches for writing software (you can also read more about Agile development.) There is less long-term planning involved in the process, and more focus is paid to the adaptability of the development workflow.

The RAD model takes information gathered during workshops and other focus groups created to identify what customers want from the product. The initial product is also tested, which helps in the creation of the final product and continued use of the parts of the product that have been proven to be effective.

The Definition of RAD

To fully understand the benefits of RAD, it is essential to know what the meaning of RAD or Rapid Application Development is. 

RAD is a type of software development that does not dedicate a lot of time or resources on planning and instead uses a method of prototyping to introduce the product.

A prototype is a version of the product that mimics what that actual product will look like, and it can complete the same functions, which allows for a faster output of the created element.

At the APP Solutions app development coompany, we distinguish several types of prototypes: 

• Wireframe prototype – this is a basic drawn picture of the what types of screens will be present in the basic version of the product (or the ones that need to be added in case the product is already past the MVP or Version 1.0 stage.) 
• Designed prototype – wireframes that have been made pretty with User Interface (UI) design. Project’s color schemes are already implemented. 
• Clickable (functional) prototype – this type of prototype already begins to have rudimentary User Experience (UX) design so that you can see where each of the buttons lead. Sometimes clickable prototypes are entirely designed in terms of UI; sometimes it’s just to show the functionality and the final designs are approved later. 

Without an abundance of preplanning in the development stage, the prototype can easily be altered to make changes throughout the testing stages quickly. The team of experts involved in the testing of the app prototype (including the developers, customer service representatives, and IT professionals) works together in a forward motion to get the best version of the prototype possible.

With RAD model of outsource app development, the client can see the demo of the final product much faster. During the creation of a prototype for any product, to save time and money, it is essential to create one that can be reused for fast changes.

SHOULD YOU HIRE APP DEVELOPERS NEAR ME OR OUTSOURCE OVERSEAS?

The 5 Essential Stages of a RAD Model

There are several stages to go through when developing a RAD model including analysis, designing, building, and the final testing phase. These steps can be divided to make them more easily understandable and achievable. The following describes the process included in all RAD models:

Stage 1: Business Modeling

Business modeling step in the RAD model takes information from the company gathered through many business-related sources. This info is then combined into a useful description of how the data can be used when it is processed, and what is making this specific information successful for the industry.

Stage 2: Data Modeling

During the Data Modeling stage, all the information gathered during the Business Modeling phase is analyzed. Through the analysis, the information is grouped into different groups that can be useful to the company. The quality of each data group is carefully examined and given an accurate description. A relationship between these groups and their usefulness as defined in the Business Modeling step is also established during this phase of the RAD model.

WHY CUSTOM APP DEVELOPMENT PROVES TO BE A PERFECT CHOICE

Stage 3: Process Modeling

The Process Modeling phase is the step in the RAD model procedure where all the groups of information gathered during the Data Modeling step are converted into the required usable information. During the Process Modeling stage, changes and optimizations can be done, and the sets of data can be further defined. Any descriptions for adding, removing, or changing the data objects are also created during this phase.

Stage 4: Application Generation

The Application Generation step is when all the information gathered is coded, and the system that is going to be used to create the prototype is built. The data models created are turned into actual prototypes that can be tested in the next step.

Stage 5: Testing and Turnover

The Testing and Turnover stage allows for reduced time in the overall testing of the prototypes created. Every model is tested separately to identify and adapt the components quickly to create the most effective product. Since most of the elements have already been examined previously, there should not be any major problems with your prototype.

4 STEPS TO OUTSOURCE IPHONE APP DEVELOPMENT

The Difference between a RAD Model and the Traditional SDLC

When completing a traditional style of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), there is a lot of planning and analysis done before the actual coding process starts.

Such waterfall model can potentially cause challenges for the customer because they are putting their time and resources into a project that is not going to have a substantial MVP for quite some time. The altering of the software after the development can be lengthy, and in some cases impossible to complete after the product reaches a certain point in development.

The RAD model is much more effective because it gives the customer a working model much sooner. The customer can quickly review the prototype, talk to investors in the meantime, showing them what the product would look like, and make changes much more easily.

Granted, the speed isn’t always the best choice to go with – especially when your product is at the later stages of its development, and features get more complicated. For the beginning phases, it can be a good start.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FIVE-STAR APP DEVELOPMENT

The Difference between RAD Model and Agile Model

RAD Model	Agile Model
RAD is used on designing prototypes, and then developers re-engineer the prototypes into production-quality code	Prototypes are used only for design or necessary business analysis during the discovery phase
Developers focus on creating the feature (no matter how bad it is at first) and then improve it	The team breaks down the solution into features
RAD teams are managed by the project manager (PM)*	Team members are self-managing*
The Agile standards described aren’t adhered to in RAD	Developers find and fix the bugs in the code as quickly as possible, and the team has the confidence to change the code without breaking the product.
Developers work as individuals (often results in unmaintainable and poorly designed code)	Agile teams focus on communication and developing the product as a team

* PM – traditional Agile indeed does call for the team members to be self-managing, but at the APP Solutions we still prefer to have a Project Manager for each of the projects and clients because it streamlines the communication processes and makes sure there are fewer misunderstandings. 

Read also: Android vs iOS Development 

How to Apply the RAD Model

As long as the product being worked on can be easily divided into separate units, the RAD model can be implemented. If the division is not possible, the RAD model may not work.

These are a few of the situations where a RAD model may be successful:

• When the system can be modularized and then distributed in a divided form;
• When there are many designers available for the modeling
• When there is money in the budget for using automated code generating tools;
• When there is an expert available to decide which model should be used (RAD or SDLC);
• When a prototype is expected by the customer within two to three months;
• When changes to the product are planned throughout the development process.

HOSPITAL APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT – EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

Knowing When to Use a RAD Model

RAD models can be very successful when quick delivery of a product is needed for a customer. It is also the best model to choose when there are going to be changes made to the prototype throughout the process before the final product is completed.

It is important to know that the RAD model is only valid when there are plenty of knowledgeable developers and engineers on hand prepared to work on the progress of the product. The customer must also remain committed to the process and the schedule in place for the completion of the model. When either of these two components is not available, the RAD formula can fail.

IOS APP DEVELOPMENT COMPANY

Let’s face it. Uber is an inspiring example for both startups and existing taxi services. Why? Because the app provides users with a convenient experience when hailing a cab. 

What could be simpler? You can hail a cab in tour taps: open the app, type the address, select riding options, and confirm.

That’s why people search for “Uber tech stack” and “What programming languages can I use to create an app like Uber?” on the Internet. But the key is that technologies and programming languages are just a means for Uber to meet its business goal – to provide fast and convenient taxi-hailing services.  

So, don’t be deceived. Those technologies wouldn’t suit your business needs unless your taxi app serves millions of users. Moreover, Uber technologies are costly to implement. 

On the other hand, you can learn from Uber’s example about obstacles your taxi app might face in the future and how to overcome them. 

Since you are here to learn about the Uber technology stack, we will gladly share it with you.   

HOW TO BUILD AN APP LIKE UBER: STEPS, FEATURES, AND COSTS

Is it hard to build an app like Uber? 

The short answer is “yes.” Uber processes vast amounts of information leveraging sophisticated ML and data analytics platforms built in-house. 

Thus, to develop an exact Uber clone, you need a significant amount of money and a large development team. 

But why would you want to copy Uber functionality? Don’t do that,  instead, you can start your cab-hailing service with simple functionality and add integrations as your business grows. 

With this idea in mind, let’s investigate Uber-like app development requirements and define the technology stack. 

WHAT TECH STACK TO CHOOSE FOR YOUR PROJECT

How do I build a real-time app like Uber?

To develop an application similar to Uber, get to know what Uber consists of. Three main components power Uber – a passenger app, driver app, and marketplace. 

Passenger app. If you have used the Uber app at least once, you know the passenger app functionality. The app has all features necessary for hailing a cab, including GPS tracking, online payments, etc. 

Driver app. This Uber component shows new ride requests from passengers nearby, allows, accepts or declines ride requests, and has a built-in map. 

But the real magic happens at the marketplace that connects these two applications. 

The marketplace carries out the most complex tasks. This component handles online requests from both Uber’s apps, matches passengers with drivers, and processes other transactions. Uber also leverages its marketplace for other products (UberRUSH and UberEATS). 

Thus, to create a similar app, you need two user interfaces for hailing a cab and accepting requests, and a sophisticated dispatch system to handle online operations. Let’s see how this process works from the inside. 

Related reading: 

HYPR CASE STUDY: HOW WE DEVELOPED A TAXI-HAILING PLATFORM 

HOW TO BUILD AN APP LIKE UBER: STEPS, FEATURES, AND COSTS

How to Integrate Uber API to your app

How does the Uber app technically work?

Every ride request made by a passenger generates a lot of information. The app receives data about the passenger, location, credit card information, taxi drivers nearby, their names and car details, and the ride cost and length. But how does information travel across the system? 

Right after you push a button to find a cab, the platform launches the following process: 

• Stores ride information on the database 
• Processes your ride request with the current geolocation
• Streams the processed data to the matching algorithm 
• Searches information about drivers nearby in the database 

Uber also leverages user-generated information for:

• Training AI-based ML algorithm 
• Visualizing your ride requests in the form of a process graphs

[Data processing flow, source]

Apart from knowing how the app works, you should also be aware of other project requirements. 

UBER FOR PRIVATE JETS: HOW MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES CAN SOLVE PRIVATE AVIATION PROBLEMS

Requirements for Uber-like projects

So, what should your cab-hailing app include to deliver the same experience as Uber? 

The core requirements are:

• Simple UI/UX design 

The application should have a clear design for both drivers and passengers. The app’s layout should help designers create new features without drawing a new design each time an Uber programmer develops a new feature. For this purpose, the company has its own UI framework, which we will discuss a bit later. 

• Microservice architecture 

With time, the number of the app’s features will grow. Thus, consider microservice architecture for your app from the very beginning. We already described the difference between monolithic and microservice architecture in the previous article. In short, monolithic architecture simplifies regular app updates and new app parts deployment. 

• Streaming services 

Many of Uber’s functionalities operate in real-time. From location tracking and matching to online payments and maps – all this functionality requires significant computing power and is expected to operate without downtime. Moreover, all these actions happen numerous times in a second in different parts of the globe. For that purpose, on-premise hosting servers fail to provide streamlined operations. That is why Uber hosts its infrastructure on cloud hosting with a dedicated network, located in a particular geographic area so that online services can work without delays.  

• Cloud storage 

Operating in numerous locations and serving millions of users generates tons of data. There is no on-premise solution that can store such an amount of information. For this reason, Uber leverages cloud storage. 

Now, let’s answer the question of how the app was created. 

UBER FOR TRUCKS APP DEVELOPMENT: ESSENTIAL FEATURES AND COSTS

I want to develop an app like Uber. What is the detailed explanation of its architecture?

Since the company’s launch in 2009, the backend has had a monolithic architecture. It included a single database and a bunch of app servers to handle online requests. 

Soon, the number of new features grew. To integrate the new features, the development team needed to deploy all their code at once, which impacted the app’s speed and made each new deployment risky and time-consuming. Each new integration could bring the whole system down.  

[A monolithic software architecture of the backend system, source]

Microservices

In 2014, the team faced the necessity of adopting new architecture for better operational performance. That is why they leveraged the microservice architecture. 

[Microservice architecture diagram, source]

The microservice architecture includes a set of services targeted to one-another’s functionality. All the applications are available over the network via the application interface (API). Microservices allows the deployment of new code independently, thus ensuring the ultimate system’s scaling. But the team didn’t stop there.

DOMA

With time, the development team applied the new approach to the system’s architecture, called DOMA (Domain-Oriented System Architecture). How is DOMA different from microservices? Let’s explain. 

Developers oriented their system design around collections of underlying services called domains. Next, they created collections of domains they called layers. Layers define what dependencies the microservices from different domains are allowed to take on. 

The development team calls such a hierarchy of microservice components a layered design. Then, developers made each domain independent from other domains using Gateway API. In this way, each domain has its own logic and isn’t related to other domains inside of its codebase or data models.  

[The gateway abstracts away the internal details of the domains, source]

To support extension points within each domain, the team provided an extension architecture to each domain. DOMA transforms microservice architectures from something complicated to something comprehensible. In this way, developers received a structured set of flexible, reusable, and layered components. 

To write the initial system’s architecture, developers used Python and SQLAlchemy as the ORM-layer to the database. After integrating a microservice architecture approach, the team integrated more than 100 services to the backend. 

However, developers integrated new features faster than they could announce them. For that reason, it is hard to answer the question, “What software does Uber use?” Don’t be surprised if they’ve already changed the Uber system design to something more innovative to meet other needs. 

We just discovered how Uber works from the inside. Now, let’s see what the app uses for the user interface. 

FUNCTIONAL VS NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS: MAIN DIFFERENCES & EXAMPLES

Which UI framework does Uber use?

As we said, the development team is continuously improving the app by adding new features. But every feature requires its own design. 

Unfortunately, checking designers’ work against the design system takes time and designers must edit their screens to match the existing design system.  

To streamline the design team’s workflow, the team created Base, a web React UI framework. 

[Base design framework, source]

Base includes pre-designed basic app’s elements: 

• Typography 
• Colors 
• Grids 
• Iconography
• Buttons 
• Lists 

Thanks to this framework, the team creates design faster and maintains high UI/UX standards and consistency. 

Now, let’s see what technologies power Uber’s web and mobile apps. 

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What is the tech stack behind Uber?

To find out what language Uber’s made from, let’s start from the very beginning. In 2014, the team used Python, MySQL, and Mongo for the Uber backend, Node.js, and Redis for a dispatch system. Java and Objective-C powered mobile applications and Backbone.js for the website. 

To meet new business requirements, developers changed almost all of the platform’s components: the marketplace and web and mobile applications. 

Marketplace Technologies Stack

The marketplace hosts data analytics and data streaming functionality. For its maintenance, Uber has a dedicated development team. It includes a data team, integrations team, front and backend engineers who build infrastructure and integrate new data solutions. The leading tech stacks for the marketplace are Python, Node, Go, and Java. 

Let’s check out the tech stack of advanced marketplace functionality:

The trip execution engine works on Node.js. Its runtime environment gave developers the ability to manage numerous concurrent connections. Now, the company creates new services in Go because of its safety, efficiency, and concurrency. 

The frontline API routes requests from passenger and driver mobile devices to other services the platform uses. Developers wrote it on Node.js and used NGINX for the frontend, so the edge ensures authentication security with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). To connect the frontline API with internal infrastructure components, developers leveraged the open-source module logtron for logging to disk, Kafka, and the Node.js client for statistics. 

Real-time connection. To ensure the highest availability demands for its online operations, developers used Ringpop, a library for building cooperative distributed systems. Thanks to this library, developers receive a highly-available, partition-tolerated connection with distributed databases like DynamoDB or Riak at the application level. 

The matching logic is written in Node.js and Go. Developers also used Ringpop and Sevnup for their function to hand off ownership of particular objects when a node in a hashing goes down or another node takes ownership of the keyspace. 

Dynamic pricing optimization uses Flask and uWSGI. But, with time, developers rewrote most Python with Go for higher performance. The team also moved from MySQL back end built with Python to Riak and Cassandra cluster that enable seamless and fast request throughput. 

Data streaming and machine learning work on Kafka, Hive, MapReduce, HDFS, Elasticsearch, the production databases, and file storage web services. The Ledger of Interactive Data Analysis Records runs JupyterHub for multi-user Jupyter (IPython) Notebooks, integrated with Apache Spark and a built-in-house data platform. 

Can you imagine? Not every company can afford to have its own ML platform. But how did Uber make it? 

In 2015, the team wanted to scale ML across the organization, avoiding ML anti-patterns while standardizing workflows and tools. Two years later, in 2017, they announced Michelangelo.

Michelangelo is an ML and AI platform covering the end-to-end ML workflow: manage data, train, evaluate, deploy models, make predictions, and monitor forecasts. 

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[Michelangelo flow for offline and online prediction services, source]

The platform includes components built in-house, as well as open-source systems, such as: 

• HDFS
• Spark
• Samza 
• Cassandra
• MLLib 
• XGBoost
• TensorFlow

Now that you know about all the marketplace secrets, let’s check out the technical stack used in web and mobile applications. 

Stack technologies of a web application

For the web-based transportation platform, developers used Node.js., an open-source, cross-platform, backend, JavaScript runtime environment. But in 2019, the company rebuilt its web application using Fusion.js, a modular Javascript framework for creating plugin-based React applications created in-house by the Uber team.

The client-side app is built with Browserify, an open-source JavaScript tool that allows developers to write Node.js-style modules that compile for browser use.

A base web server named Bedrock is built with Express.js, a popular backend web application framework. The server has a set of default middleware to provide security, internationalization, and other User-specific pieces that handle infrastructure integration. 

The build system, Core Tasks, has a standard set of scripts to compile and version frontend assets. Developers used Gulp.js, a stack technology that automates workflow by publishing to the file storage web service. 

Application rendering and state handling are supported by standard Flux application architecture for React.js apps. 

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Mobile technology stack examples

There are four mobile applications: Android rider, Android driver, iOS rider, and iOS driver. For mobile apps, the team wasn’t inventive. Developers built Android apps with Java and iOS apps with Objective-C and Swift. But there is a bunch of other technologies: 

Android app tech stack 

• Gradle is a building system for Android apps
• OkHttp, Retrofit, and Gson ensure networking 
• Dagger is a dependency injection framework
• Butter Knife powers views and callbacks to fields and methods via annotation processing
• Picasso provides image loading.
• Espresso ensures native automation code writing
• RxJava allows asynchronous and event-based programming architecture that
• Timber for logging

iOS app tech stack 

• Buck powers a monorepo for storing iOS app code
• Masonry and SnapKit with Auto Layout ensures the component building and scaling 
• KSCrash, the internal reporting framework, detects and reports crashes
• OCMock mocks and stubs classes for testing Objective-C code 

Let’s sum everything up. 

What programming languages can I use to create an app like Uber?

To develop a project like Uber, apply technologies from this list: 

• Python for a web-based booking app
• Node.js for Marketplace web application 
• Go for high performance, simplicity, and runtime speed
• Java for integration with third-party services 
• Browserify for the client-side bundling
• ELk (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) for storing logs, shipping, processing, and visualization 
• Apache Hive data warehouse for data query and analytics 
• Apache Cassandra for handling a large amount of data 
• MySQL Database Service for relational database management 
• Mesos/Docker for data centers infrastructure 
• HAProxy for the load balancer and proxy server
• MySQL, PostgreSQL, Schemaless, and Heatpipe (HP) Scheme, Kafka, Samza, Athen for data streaming and processing

And the list of technology stack examples doesn’t end here. Unfortunately, copying the technology behind Uber doesn’t guarantee your cab-hailing service will have the same success. Let us explain why. 

The company applies a market-driven approach. Before adding one or another feature, the team analyzes user data first and makes data-driven decisions afterward. In plain words, Uber gives users what they want while searching for room for improvement. 

To build a successful cab-hailing service, do the same. Instead of collecting hi-end technologies, start small.  Use as few technologies and languages as possible. 

As your business grows, you might face the same challenges Uber did – the need for independent components deployment, user data analytics, and ML algorithms. Maybe even streaming the workflow of the UI design team. But, before this happens, you can use Uber stack only as an inspiration source on technologies to leverage in one or another case. 

We can create a personalized technology stack tailored to your business needs. To make that happen, tell us more about your idea, and we will get in touch with you soon. 

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