Mobila

Mobila was developed as an Android Go friendly, white-label consumer engagement platform for the delivery of relevant content, loyalty offers and financial services to emerging mass market consumers. The first iteration was built in partnership with one of South Africa’s largest value retailers for pre-loading on their in-house brand of Android Go smartphones and to serve as a test bed for a potential super-app strategy that would eventually include other emerging digital features and services.

Two of the key technical challenges were how to keep data usage costs as low as possible and how to bring such a rich set of features to life on Android Go smartphones that typically have only 512MB to 1GB RAM and 4-8GB of storage memory.

Given the need for optimal performance from these resource-constrained target smartphones, we elected to build the mobile client natively in Android. The performance results have indeed been impressive as the app uses less than 50mb of RAM at peak and the core app is less than 10mb in size . Due to limited device storage we also employed extensive offline caching & smart syncing to only retrieve content and data when needed. Push events are relied upon to synchronise content that the user interacts with when updated. The back-end makes full use of Amazon Web Services’ serverless architecture which has allowed the platform to be cost-effective to maintain and run and provides a stable base for further experimentation with new features and services.

The central feature is a flexible, card driven scrolling feed that displays content from a variety of initial modular content categories such as comics, e-books, music, games, quotes, gamified rewards, podcasts and education. These content sources are managed via a custom back-end content management system (CMS).

The design also allows for white-labelled versions of the app to be tightly integrated into channel partner ecosystems and for extending functionality to include features like loyalty schemes and financial services offerings.

Extensive effort has been put into creating a modularised design system and visual language that enables design elements to be re-used for different white label partners quickly and cost effectively. Examples below show versions created for retailer PEP Stores and the Kaizer Chiefs Football Club.