iAwake Technologies is an established company focused on producing and distributing sound-based tools for meditation and other similar use cases. They contracted Factorial Complexity to help bring their vast catalog of audio content to mobile. A modern media streaming application needed to be built and integrated into the existing CRM system. A turnkey solution was needed, including the UI/UX design.
Solution
The customer was interested in a solution with a short time to market and had a limited budget for the initial version. Factorial Complexity suggested React Native as a cost-effective solution for a mobile application. On the backend, the improvised CMS for the audio library was developed on top of the spreadsheets and files, organized in folders on Amazon S3. This saved the costs for building or customizing a complex frontend CMS.
Web service on Node.js was built to serve the media library to the mobile application. The integration with the third party service (FastSpring) was developed in order to allow users who previously purchase the content to access it on a mobile application.
Media Streaming
The core of the application - media streaming engine - was developed using native code to ensure the best performance and compatibility.
Caching and Downloading for Offline Listening
All media is automatically cached to disk while listening. Users can listen to any cached content when offline. It is also possible to explicitly download whatever content the user wants to be available for offline listening. Efforts were put into ensuring the efficient use of the bandwidth. All the media content is hosted on Amazon and served with Amazon CloudFront CDN.
UI Look and Feel
The application UI might look a bit unorthodox sometimes. However, this direction was specifically taken to target the niche audience of iAwake under the guidance of the product owners. Factorial Complexity team did our best to ensure the best UX practices are followed and the application is nice looking.
Playlists
The application allows creating and managing playlists and offers a decent player experience on-par with the music distribution industry behemoths like Apple Music or Spotify.
For iAwake Technology this was a pilot project in a mobile space, and the goal was to build MVP in a cost-effective manner. In order to achieve this, we have looked deeper into the customer's business model. We worked closely with the customer team to make sure our works served the purpose well. Our developers had extended our experience in modern media streaming technologies.
Few updates to version 1 of the application were already made. Factorial Complexity continues supporting the application and adding new functionality.
