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Project Overview

Kirin is a cross-platform development framework designed and developed in-house by Future Platforms, providing the ability to deliver native user interfaces with shared business and application logic. Our framework helps reduce the time and cost spent on implementation, support, and maintenance, ensuring we deliver stable and unified suites of apps. For clients like Domino’s Pizza, who process over £5million of orders each week through their apps (10m downloads), the smallest error could result in a significant drop in sales; using Kirin, for example, allows us to immediately change to a new API across all their apps with stability & efficiency.

Organisation

Future Platforms

Team

Ben Strawson, Technical Director
Douglas Hoskins, Head of Mobile Development
Robert Wiltshire, Technical Lead
Myles Wilter-Heritage, Junior Developer
Kassim Maguire, (former) Developer

Project Brief

We are of the firm belief that it’s important to build a native user interface, but also acknowledge the complication of having to rebuild business and application logic from scratch for each platform. iOS, Android and Windows apps are developed using different languages, meaning code cannot be easily reused when targeting multiple platforms. Building a native app can be an arduous and expensive process, where individual changes must be made to all iterations of the app across each operating system. As such, our goal was to allow the business and app logic to be developed in a single language, whilst ensuring that the user interface is still native and therefore familiar to the user.

We sought to develop a process where the amount of platform-specific code is reduced, but where native functionality and interfaces are fully maintained. Due to user behaviour and expectation, it is rare that we deliver solutions for clients that only exist on one platform, and as a result look to Kirin to streamline the process of building and maintaining multi-platform apps for clients. Kirin enables our business to offer secure, stable and scalable cross-platform solutions to clients, with each app taking full advantage of the operating system it runs on. These apps can then be maintained and improved upon with greater ease and efficiency, reducing the time and cost required to implement changes.

Project Need

Using Kirin, all of the common local application and business logic is written in one language: Java. As Android’s native language, Java provides a stable and familiar foundation upon which to build code for iOS and Windows. Using Google Web Toolkit, the Java code is translated into JavaScript, which can run on all devices. Through being able to write a single set of code covering multiple operating systems, we have been able to streamline and improve the speed of the development process, freeing up time to focus on building rich and engaging native user interfaces. Unlike other mobile cross-platform solutions, Kirin also allows us to target platforms outside of mobile such as Xbox One, which we have done to great success with Domino’s Pizza and Microsoft.

We have produced some of our finest projects using Kirin, including apps for highly reputable clients including Domino’s Pizza, EE, Wembley Stadium, Glastonbury Festival, The FA, and Premier League. Kirin’s most successful (and ongoing) use is on the suite of apps we build and maintain for Domino’s Pizza, which have been downloaded more than 10 million times in the UK. The apps, developed and published on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Tablet, and Xbox One, all feature native-built interfaces that run on a single set of Kirin code. Domino’s processes £5 million in sales per week using these apps, and Kirin us allows to keep them running efficiently, implementing changes and updates across the entire suite.

User Experience

As a development framework, Kirin is not itself responsible for elements of the UI or UX. However, the benefits it brings enable us to dedicate a greater amount of resource to creating bespoke, native user interfaces that are optimised for each platform. For an end-user, this provides an immersive mobile experience that takes full advantage of the subtle nuances and differences between iOS, Android and Windows Phone, while also establishing a continuity of features across platforms.

As with any well-structured code, Kirin enables us to make wide-scale functionality or system changes without impacting on the user interface or user experience in the process. For our UX and design teams, Kirin provides an understanding of expected behaviour, features and functionalities that will be present across different platforms.

Project Marketing

We currently present Kirin as part of our project process when in discussion with current or potential clients, and do not market the framework as an independent service. It is, however, open-source on GitHub, and we are looking to encourage a greater level of community involvement.

While we are advocates of using it to develop cross-platform apps, we also appreciate that one size does not fit all and accept that some clients may wish to pursue alternative development methods. However, we cite our market-leading work with Domino’s Pizza as a strong and impressive indicator of the benefits that are possible when using Kirin, and do encourage clients to use it whenever applicable.

Project Privacy

As an open-source platform, Kirin ensures that our clients don’t have to pay for licensing costs, and also protects them from the risk of ‘developer lock-in’ should they decide to re-assign the role of app development to another party. Its open-source status also means the tool benefits from the input and suggestions of the wider development community. However, our in-house technical team reviews all suggestions before making any changes, and as a result we remain in ultimate control of its behaviour and functionality.

Best Dev Platform/Dev tools/framework

The current pick of the crop apps have moved from roll your own to accelerating by using platforms, tools and frameworks,  just like yours. The winner of this category will be a dev platform or service that makes the App life cycle go easier than other alternatives, it will power features that would have taken years to bring to market and allow App Designers to run and jump where if they had to do it themselves they would just be imagining their solution

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