How I built an enterprise app for the price of a PlayStation

In 2015, Liberty on-boarded a small mobile development company to build a mobile app for employees. This minimum viable product (MVP) was built at a fairly average price tag for building native mobile apps with a couple of features in a time frame of six months. The app was very slick, user friendly and we received very positive feedback from our early adopter user base of 500 employees.

In 2016, the employee app funding was drastically reduced and we could not continue with further developments with the selected vendor. After doing some research, I stumbled upon online app builders, who offered a zero code platform to develop mobile apps. Online app builders allow any non-technical person to build mobile apps by dragging and dropping the components they require. There are over 100 of these online app builders who exist so, I tested out the top 10 and selected AppyPie as a preferred one.

The reasons I selected AppyPie are as follows:

Functionality - They have the largest list of features and they are continuously adding emerging technologies into their product such as ChatBot and Augmented Reality.
Price - Very competitive.
Customer base - Already have a large customer base claiming over 1 000 000 apps
Good reviews - All tech websites rated them in the top ten.
Support - Immediate response to all my questions. Sometimes I asked very technical questions which were answered by the appropriate technical staff within a few hours.
Free version - Which allowed to test out the product completely before deciding.

Within four hours, I had replicated the employee app that the development company took six months to deliver on, plus I had added tons of additional functionality within the four hours. Thereafter, it took me a few months to obtain all the relevant approvals and the app was rolled out company wide.

What worked really well?

AppyPie made most of the development process easy - such as signing up, making payment, easily creating the app with a drag and drop interface and deploying the app to the app stores.
With no marketing, we had over 1 000 employees sign up in a week.
The overwhelming positive response received from stakeholders has been amazing.
The overall value received outweighs the price tag.

What were some of the challenges faced?

Being a financial institution our internal governance is much more stringent than other companies and getting the app off the ground proved to be cumbersome as the solution resided in the cloud. Our internal departments such as IT Risk, Security, PoPI and Legal teams had to properly vet the solution to ensure that we are protected against threats.
The biggest issue was device compatibility. It worked perfectly on all the latest devices, which catered for the majority of the user base, but the older Android, Apple devices were problematic. Windows and Blackberry users also struggled and we had to make a call to stop support for the older devices.
With AppyPie being in a different country, reporting bugs has not been easy at times. If the developers could not identify the issue from their side, I had to share videos to show them the errors and occasionally they could not replicate the issue.
Not having a dedicated mobile team to this project was taxing as it required that I had to create content single-handedly and be responsible for administering users, providing support, managing the project, stakeholder engagement, artwork design, publishing content, testing and marketing the app.

Overall the development and delivery of the employee app has been a very rewarding experience. If you are looking to jump on board the digital disruption bandwagon, I suggest you try out one of these Online App Builders for your next mobile app project.