Progress Slashes Mobile Development Time for Leading Israel Classified Ads Site
Products:
UI for XamarinChallenge
When developing mobile apps for this sophisticated market, a responsive user experience was imperative. Just over a year ago, start-up ad.co.il made its entry into Israel’s highly competitive online classified ad space. It differentiated itself with two unique propositions—the first to aggregate ads across dozens of categories from Israel’s top classified ad sites and a focus front and center on user experience.
Solution
ad.co.il did not have the resources to develop for Android and iOS separately, so Margalit first turned to Cordova for a multi-platform development solution where they encountered performance issues. They then turned to Telerik® UI for Xamarin by Progress
Result
Launched two months ago to a small group of beta users with high expectations, early results point to a successful debut with over 1,000 users and the uninstall rate is proven to be extremely low.
Full Story
Challenge
According to the Pew Research Institute, 74% of all Israeli adults owned a smartphone in 2015, surpassing high mobile penetration regions like the United States, China and Japan. When developing mobile apps for this sophisticated market, a responsive user experience is imperative. Just over a year ago, start-up ad.co.il made its entry into Israel’s highly competitive online classified ad space. It differentiated itself with two unique propositions—the first to aggregate ads across dozens of categories from Israel’s top classified ad sites and a focus front and center on user experience. “Because of a heavy presence of banner ads, performance is an issue on many existing sites,” said ad.co.il CIO Elad Margalit. “We focused on making the site as responsive as possible by accepting only a limited amount of text ads.” Margalit’s strategy to focus on user experience paid off. Today the site has more than 400,000 unique users. He is determined to duplicate that success as ad.co.il ventures into mobile. “To be successful, we need a cross-platform development solution that can deliver a truly native experience,” he said. “That is what our users expect from us and we won’t deliver the app unless it has great UI.”
Margalit's strategy to focus on user experience paid off. Today the site has more than 400,000 unique users. He is determined to duplicate that success as ad.co.il ventures into mobile. “To be successful, we need a cross-platform development solution that can deliver a truly native experience,” he said. “That is what our users expect from us and we won’t deliver the app unless it has great UI.”
Solution
Result
Launched two months ago to a small group of beta users with high expectations, early results point to a successful debut. “We have over 1,000 users and the uninstall rate is extremely low,” Margalit said. “That to us is a key indicator that we made the right choice.” Margalit cited ListView and SideDrawer as two features of Telerik UI for Xamarin that not only speed development, but enhance user functionality. “ListView is amazing,” he said. “Given that we are a classified ad site, ListView scenarios are of critical importance to us because of the amount of information we need to present. The Load on Demand feature for example, automatically gets users more items as they scroll down. We also used the native templates option to maximize performance. “We are pleased to have Progress on our side with its great support organization that helped us launch the app in record time and the company’s commitment to deliver the most innovative functionality when it comes to mobile development.”
“In addition,” he continued, “SideDrawer certainly helped us maximize the real estate of a small screen and simplify navigation. These are features that we could not do without.” Looking ahead, Margalit plans to continue to enhance ad.co.il’s mobile app. “In the near term we are looking to add smart agents to help refine searches as well as user chats,” he said. “We are pleased to have Progress on our side with its great support organization that helped us launch the app in record time and the company’s commitment to deliver the most innovative functionality when it comes to mobile development.” “With some small modifications and customization, Telerik UI for Xamarin delivered the native performance we were looking for, saving us months of development time and expense we really did not want to take on.”
For more information, please visit:
http://www.ad.co.il/