Everyone who has pets at home has heard about Petshop and its chain of offline stores. Here, we will tell you how we made a mobile app for Petshop, a major online pet supplies store.
Online pet supplies store Petshop turns 10 this year. Having been growing as an eCommerce business for a whole decade, Petshop has a sophisticated IT infrastructure. Since we were only required to develop mobile apps for iOS and Android, we didn’t have to create server software and deploy API. Therefore, we were able to roll out the first beta version as quickly as possible. Later, it was released for all users in major stores like App Store, Google Play Store, and Huawei App Gallery.
What does the biggest player in the pet supplies market focus most on in their product? They focus on everything. So, to enable them to focus on "everything" much easier, our team devoted particular attention to mobile app analytics. To achieve this, we wrapped each action in the app in Firebase analytics handlers. A peculiarity of the implementation is that on one dashboard, you could see analytics results for all platforms at once. But achieving this had its challenges.
The main challenge was that Google mobile services are not allowed on modern Huawei devices. This includes the main Google Mobile Services (GMS) toolkit, of which Google Firebase is indirectly a part. To overcome this hurdle, in the Huawei APK version of the app, we added mirrored events through Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and proxied them to Firebase. In this way, we managed to achieve a single kernel that collects all information about all app users. This information is then used to improve the mobile apps and boost user experience.
We were delighted to have worked together with a team of professionals, providing maintenance and facilitating the growth of the largest online pet store in the country. As we continue to work on the Petshop product and put in more efforts, we expect the project to grow further, and we hope
that every user would have healthier and happier pets!
