Community Care – Communication App

The statement of work was to develop a native iOS and Android mobile app and its integration with the existing React Native app. The app was supposed to deliver one-to-one and group – video calling and chat solutions for users in the field of healthcare. The users of these apps suppose to be patient/s, and care team members of a community with health services providers as doctors.

The care team includes nursing staff or caregivers, who assist patients at home with their respective treatment plans and medication. These patients are either old-aged or disabled and cannot afford to go to hospitals for frequent follow-ups with doctor/s.

In discussion with the customer, it was required to implement a native platform mobile application for Android and iOS, using which users associated with community care can initiate one or group video call or chat with utmost ease and excellent performance. Both video call and chat apps suppose to receive in-app push notifications and at times certain actions suppose to be initiated when the user taps on a push notification. The following are identified as tasks of the highest importance of what users can do.

• Initiate one-to-one or group video calls or chats.
• Receive video calls or reply chat.
• Reject/Decline a video call.
• Pause and resume a video call.
• Leave a video call.
• Notifications to users for all calling events.
• Video call and chat history logs.
• Muting a running video call.
• User signs in with two-factor authentication.

• Manage video calls when there is another voice call received over the phone.
• Manage video calls and chat when the app is in the background.
• Manage video calls and chat when the app is closed/killed.
• Manage in-app volume in conjunction with device volume during an ongoing video call.
• Integration of native app with existing react native app.
• Handle mute event for video call.
• Handling multiple windows when a group video call is in progress for up to 10 users.
• Handling VoIP notifications for iOS.

We captured requirements, performed business analysis, and presented the customer with wireframes/static screenshots for the complete process. The functional specification defines complete process flow as well as underneath workflow under process flow, wherever required. A high-level and detailed designed scalable, secure, and performance-oriented architecture is presented to the customer providing tech stack details to be used in this application.

The application development started in an agile mode and the product/spring backlog was managed on GitLab. The user story progress is tracked over the Kanban chart. The technology stack used was Swift for the iOS mobile app and Java for the Android mobile app. The web backend application was developed in Java/J2EE. The release/deployment infrastructure is managed by DevOps in CI/CD fashion. For push notifications, FCM was used for the Android app while VoIP was used for the iOS app.