Club Brugge KV? RSC Anderlecht? FC Barcelona? Liverpool?
Using VRT’s Sporza Voetbalapp fans know football scores in national and international competitions first. Football fans use the app to follow their favourite matches live, with text updates, notifications, statistics, live streams and more. Xplore Group and VRT developed the app in just six months.
Sporza is the sports channel of Flemish public broadcasting company VRT. Market research by Sporza indicated a growing demand for specialized sport-related mobile apps among sports fans. VRT decided to test the waters with a mobile football app: the Sporza Voetbalapp.
Two dedicated mobile development teams – for iOS and Android – were put together, consisting of mobile experts from both Xplore Group and VRT’s Digital Production Centre. Xplore Group and VRT first defined a minimum viable product, containing functionalities such as competition calendars, rankings, favourite teams and push notifications for match events. In just six months, the teams delivered the first iOS and Android versions of the app.
Following the app’s initial success, Sporza decided to add more features. New versions are released every time a feature is developed and tested. A particular example was the 2016 UEFA European Championship themed version, including additional features such as live streaming, game line-up and statistics. Throughout each cycle, a strong focus was put on Test Driven Development (continuous integration, automatic testing) and Quality Assurance through dedicated QA testers, resulting in 99,5% crash-free apps.
Numbers
- Up to 135.000 concurrent users
- 290.000 app installs
- 99,5% crash-free
Xploration
Sporza wanted an interactive mobile app for football fans, both on the iOS and Android platforms.Our solution
The Sporza Voetbalapp is VRT’s interactive mobile app for football fans. Built in just six months for both iOS and Android, continuously adding new features since its initial release.Integration
- Functional Reactive Programming
- Test Driven Development
- Continuous Delivery
- iOS frameworks: Reliant Dependency Injection, Reactive Cocoa, AFNetworking, JWPlayer
- Android frameworks: RXJava, Retrofit, Dagger, Picasso, Butterknife, JWPlayer
- Integration with a mobile middleware layer on top of a sports database
Result
Xplore Group and VRT developed and delivered a compelling interactive experience for football fans on iOS and Android, with a continuously growing feature set.“Xplore Group’s strategic user experience experts captured the needs and expectations of the app’s target audience and translated them into the wireframes and designs that were used during the development process. The project was managed using a Kanban approach, in close collaboration with the Sporza staff.”
