After months of development in Mobile Jazz, the ClubKviar iOS/iPhone application was released to the AppStore with great success and reached the top charts shortly after its launch. Some of this success has been made possible with the help of Bugfender and being able to get the logs from beta testers to build an even better high quality product.
What is ClubKviar?
ClubKviar, launched in early 2012, is a private gastronomic club that offers a curated selection of a city’s top restaurants, coupled with a simple online reservation service, and a Personal Assistant to facilitate table bookings.
A group of international investors saw the immense potential last fall, and quickly invested $1 million to expand the service throughout Europe. One of the main big things to do with the invested money was to create an iOS application to offer a better user experience to mobile users.
While developing the app, Bugfender has been extremely helpful for the development team. The creation of the app involved two different teams: the iOS development team, and also the backend team, as a RESTful API has been created for the app.
In creating the app, we have used our usual stack of extra libraries and services: AFNetworking, Crashlytics (now called Fabric), Google Analytics, Motis, and a few others. All these libraries speed up the development cycle, and they also assist us in obtaining information on the development phase.
As Clubkviar was already a mature product when the iOS app development started, it was very important to test the app with some real users to check that it works properly for different users and cases. At the beginning, Firebase Crashlytics Android/iOS helped us to find crashes on different users and devices, but soon we realized that this wasn’t enough. Once the beta testers started to use the app, some of them complained that they weren’t able to do a log-in. This problem was really hard to debug, as most of the users are very far from our offices, and Crashlytics wasn’t helpful, as it only provides information after a crash happens.
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At this point, we integrated Bugfender in our product. Once installed, we changed all our NSLog calls to BFLog calls in order to obtain the logs of the remote devices. With Bugfender integrated in the app, we have released a new version to the beta testers using TestFlight, and after a couple of hours we started to receive the logs from the problematic devices. With these logs we discovered a problem in the RESTful API that the backend team solved in an extremely short time, thanks to the information Bugfender provided.
With the help of Bugfender, the app launch was well received by existing ClubKviar members, and effectively attracted literally thousands of new users. We were very excited to reach the Top Charts of the iOS App Store side-by-side with the Facebook app just one day after launch!
With thousands of users using the app every day, we keep using Bugfender to solve issues in the app, as well as the backend.
