Story of FirstWire Apps

26
Dec

What was before FirstWire Apps?

We created a B2C Mobile App called FirstWire .

Team at FirstWire envisaged a future where people would be able to receive useful and interesting information by voluntarily subscribing to channels and topics which will keep spams and unwanted stuffs out.

With this dream, we started working on our flagship product FirstWire.

Idea was great and team was excited. We began the development and gave ourselves three months to complete it. However one week into development and we realized that we would not be able to meet the deadlines as we have completely underestimated the intricacies of native mobile app development.

Mobile app development is remarkably different from web development as you do not have many ready to use templates to build upon. Each mobile OS platform is different from others, comes with multiple versions and always has some or other sets of obsolete libraries. In fact you also have to consider the hardware issues like screen sizes, manufacturer brands , OS versions etc while doing the app development.

We did launch a great app (App link). FirstWire received a great response and got more than 5k downloads in no time.

All in all we had some great lessons.

Lesson Number One – Mobile App development is a time consuming and costly affair. It’s not for the faint hearted.

Lesson Number Two – There are no or very minimal support from open source developer community when it comes to Mobile App development while there are plenty of open source tools for web development projects.

Lesson Number Three – Coding is only half the work done. Proper testing on multiple devices & OS versions is a very critical part of the entire process.

How the idea of FirstWire Apps came up?

After talking to my friends in Mobile App companies, we realized that this is a universal problem.

Lot of teams and businesses are facing the same issue. They are stuck in lengthy and costly affair of app development process.

For us, it was time to offer something more efficient & more sensible.

We decided to launch a suite of ready to use mobile app templates which could be used for various industries & domains in SME sectors.

We built a huge set of core features acting as building blocks. So whenever a new App requirement comes up, we could assemble these blocks and create an app much faster compared to traditional app development processes, something akin to what a Computer vendor does in Assembled PC business.

We had a special care for Quality as all these modules were developed and tested over a long period of time so we could make a strong founding codebase with no bug .

Idea is simple? Isn’t it? We thought that maybe since it takes a lot of pain and time to build frameworks and basic infrastructure and that it doesn’t provide immediate short term gains, it could probably be really hard for IT vendors to forget cash rich clients and work on something like this?

But Why FirstWire Apps ? not something else?

IT is known to reduce inefficiencies but most of the projects end up creating “new” problems while solving old one only half of the times. This uncertainty gave rise to web based SaaS models and Open Source tools and while industry was still getting used to these tools, Mobile Apps have taken over the world by storm.

Mobile Apps are mostly written from scratch and put a great stress on IT budgets. Is there any better way? Can we make app development more efficient? Can we make it faster? Can we make it cheaper? What if we make it cheaper, faster and better, whats next? I need not explain that there is a huge value to uncover if we achieve all these objectives.

As more and more Startups and companies want to create their mobile apps, it has to be faster, better and cheaper so they can do their experiments fast enough , adhere to “fail fast” regime and move on to new business models fast. It would be quite a shame to spend months to only figure out a basic app product.

We believe that this will be a game changer and we would like to be at the forefront of this revolution.

What about Competition ?

Yes we do have great competitors , however most of them use self-help model which is bit different from what we do. Read here to know how are we different from our competitors.

What is this actually called?

We call it “Mobile App as a Service” or MaaS.

Mobile apps are hosted on App stores (Google Play Store / Apple Play Store), we build apps and hand over to clients. They can upload it to their App store accounts or ask us to upload in our accounts. We do it as long as Google/Apple app stores do not have any copyright issues and approve the apps.

Some of the services like Push Notifications are supported through cloud services, hosted on our platforms.

We follow “Extreme Programming” [1] approach for App development work.

What is the Vision behind FirstWire Apps?

We want to revolutionize Mobile App development by making it affordable, delivering in days (not in months) and building great quality products.

What happens to the right on Code (IP) ?

As in any other SaaS model, we keep the rights of the code in “MaaS” model. Client owns their data, brands, logos, images, customization etc.

Frankly speaking, business clients are not bothered about the code (they don’t have time for that actually) but they do bother about a good support system. Since we know our code well so we keep it bug free, update it with latest OS patches and keep the UI as per the latest trends & standards in the market.

We also take fresh projects where clients can keep all the rights on Code and documentation.