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