Apple Watch Integration for the App Bike Citizens
2022 • 2 months • 1 iOS-dev, 1 backend-dev, 1 UX-designer
Bike Citizens is a navigation-app for cyclists available for iOS and Android with around 100.000 active users. With Apple just having announced their Apple Watch Ultra we wanted to offer a simple yet effective integration for Apple Watch and Healthkit.
We worked in a small and agile team of 2 devs and me and planned on releasing a minimum viable product as fast as possible.
For this we first got an Apple Watch for the iOS-developer and one for the designer and startet testing what it can do. I also started learning as much as possible about best practices and competitor products.
- After this we sat together and agreed on only releasing the possibilty to start and stop tracking with information on duration, distance and heartrate in our first version.
- The devs started with backend and the connection to Apple Health while I drew out a first prototype of the app and presented it within the company.
- When the dev presented a first working version of the prototype we quickly deployed it to our test app and got as many people to test it as we could.
- I continuosly tested the app, gave feedback and prepared everything for the release like translations and visuals for the App Store.
- We set up a live-ticker to get notified whenever someone uploads a track from their Apple Watch to closely monitor the new feature.
After getting rid of all obvious bugs and getting a working product we released it without announcing the new feature to see if any serious bugs were reported before announcing it and sending out push-messages.
What I learned:
- It was surprising how many people started immediately importing hundreds of tracks from Apple Health.
- How awesome lean product design can be.
- Designing Interfaces for smartwatches and what to look out for.
- Organizing the release of a new feature and communicating it to users and within the company
