Tuesday 2 August 2016

Zerch iOS Release (1.8.0) Review: Offer List Revamp, Apple Maps & The Road Ahead..!

A loud shout-out to our ever growing community of people who have been a part of the Zerch Journey for quite some time now and we profoundly cherish every bit of it, least to say; it would not have been possible without you people. We are coming back after a pretty long break but never the less it wasn’t the time lost rather we were evolving in the technical space to give best services to our customers at the same time working around the clock, thriving for excellence.

In keeping up with the tradition of our latest iOS version (updates/releases happen once in every two weeks), our latest release saw couple of major transformations which helped us in providing a better modified user interface and experience.
To begin with, this particular release saw the revamp of the Offer List Architecture. The offer list that traditionally used to be displayed would also fetch the offer details which was not necessary and was causing delay in response time.
The biggest pain point in this approach was the caching problem. Typically, in cell phones and networks, a cache usually refers to a memory storage area in the phone or network that stores copies of information that is likely to be needed in the near future, so it can be accessed faster. For example, when you visit a web page on your phone, a copy of the page may be stored in the phone's cache memory. Then if that page is requested again, it can instantly be displayed from the cache, instead of waiting for the page to download from the Internet again.

So, when the offer list is being called along with the offer detail; an unnecessary cache to data was taking place which was making the entire process slow and tedious. Also, earlier; the offer list could be displayed in the absence of internet (offline offer listing) which was creating confusion for the end customers and causing disparity.

So, in order to get these issues sorted, the new release saw the revamp of the entire Offer List ecosystem. Currently, when the call is made for the offer list, only the data for offer list is fetched. Once a particular offer is selected, only then the fetching of offer details happen. This could take place thanks to our technical wizards who changed the core data right from the point where it is handled and executed. The approximate turnaround time for this entire process was 2 weeks.

Another highlight of this release was the lazy loading animations which can be clearly seen in the offer list scrolling part as well as when the app is initiated before coming onto the landing page.

Lastly, the transformation aspect which involved moving away from Apple Maps to Google Maps. The problem with using Apple Maps is more memory usage. The memory was not being released even while moving from one screen to another. Thanks to Apple Maps (rhetoric), the Operating System (iOS) kills the app if it is running in background when the memory level reaches a critical value. So, it made all the more sense to move to Google Maps and luckily for us it worked out pretty well.

This was all about our last release. We have exciting plans & features in the pipeline keeping the iOS environment at the heart of all things. Keep watching this space for more updates, upcoming releases and their review story.

More and more exciting offers are being added as you read on…!

As always, keep watching this space for more, as it only gets better from here! 

Team Zerch

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