Fitness App Development for adidas
- Intelligent fitness suite guiding users towards their sports goals.
- Data aggregation across various smart devices, data compilation within integrated desktop, web, and mobile apps.
- Sports data analysis and visualization enabling users to control their training programs and progress.
One of the world’s largest manufacturers of sports products, adidas challenged Rishi Software Services(RSS) with sports app development to provide their customers with a manageable digital training assistant.
Customer
With their business roots in Germany, adidas is an international company that specializes in designing and producing top-quality sportswear and equipment. The company numbers over 50,000 employees and delivers almost a billion sports products yearly.
Challenge
While focusing on sportswear and goods, adidas also takes an active part in creating and popularizing sports technologies incorporated into smart devices. Following their tech ambitions, the company launched an innovative line of wearables powered with a custom suite of integrated intelligent sports software. The complex solution was to help both athletes and health enthusiasts to set up and successfully achieve their sports and fitness goals.
The product line includes a variety of devices (smartwatches, chest strap heart rate monitors, shoe-attached trackers to control movement dynamics, etc.) to cover the needs of different user groups. Altogether, these wearables gather fitness statistics and vital signs that range from the distance and steps taken to the heart rate and calories burnt. After a workout, users can connect their wearables to iOS, Android or Windows devices to upload the collected data to the custom-designed application. When signed in to the app, users can fine-tune their training plans based on the results achieved so far, which transforms the app into a professional digital coach available 24/7.
adidas offered both desktop and web versions of the fitness application. Unfortunately, the desktop app was going through regular performance issues, which affected user experience. What’s worse, the synchronization process between the web and the desktop components, as well as between the desktop app and wearables, had flaws. Because of that, the Customer could hardly guarantee a consistent quality of personal sports data that end users got.
Application analysis and redesign
To preserve their reputation and customers’ loyalty, adidas decided to go for an in-depth analysis of the existing desktop application to find the root cause of the troubles. That was the initial task that the company gave to RSS.
The outlined task started with an extra challenge: once RSS’s team took up the analysis of the desktop app, they revealed that there was no detailed solution documentation, which made it impossible to understand the inner logic of the app without decomposing it manually. The team offered to carry out reverse engineering to decompile the app back to its Java source code. This step was critical to revealing the nature of errors occurring during the synchronization. Having summed up the detected code inconsistencies, the Customer decided to redesign the desktop solution and invited RSS’s sports app developers to continue working on the project.
Solution
The fulfilled redesign helped adidas get a new solution that ensured quick and error-free synchronization between the wearables, the web app, and the desktop app. That guaranteed that end users could access the same set of sports data whatever device or app they used.
How it works
Professional athletes and health enthusiasts use adidas wearables during their training. At the end of each training, the user can synchronize their health data gathered during the workout session with their smartphones, laptops, or PCs. During the first sign-in, the desktop app requires the user to select devices that will be further detected as recognized devices and synced automatically.
Once transferred to the desktop app, sports data can be synced via Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) with the web app for further analysis and reporting. The web app processes the data and transforms it into user-friendly charts and graphs displaying users’ performance, sports dynamics, and personal results.
The web application enables users to continuously monitor the progress of their workouts and rely on the processed data to find the balance between the effort spent and the results obtained.
Users can download personal coaching programs from the web app to their PCs and then synchronize them across their devices and wearables. In the "coaching" mode, the app generates relevant training recommendations that users can listen to and follow right during their workout.
Fitness app enhancements
Apart from redesigning the desktop app, adidas also planned to enhance the rest of their suite, including the web app, the wearables’ firmware, as well as mobile apps. To cover all of these needs, Rishi Software Services(RSS) enlarged the initial team. This allowed the developers to work on the desktop and web apps, mobile app development, and enhancement of wearables simultaneously.
Iflexion’s fitness app developers participated actively in the elaboration of extended functionality for both the web and the desktop apps. Among the offered feature there were:
- Detailed user profiles to ensure that the app builds highly personalized training programs
- Nutrition recommendations to help users adapt their meals to the selected sports plan
- Training videos to enable users to search for, watch, and bookmark exercises and training tips by professional coaches
- Rewards to let users feel proud of their achievements and encourage them to set up new and more difficult goals
- Alternative routing to let users select running routes according to their body condition, daily activity, running experience, and sports goals (keeping fit, losing weight, building muscles, etc.)
- Sports communities to let users connect with other people engaged in a similar sports plan, nutrition program or taking similar running routes
Several out of the offered features later became part of the app, which allowed the Customer to increase the number of subscriptions and the overall user satisfaction with the sports suite.
As the team had demonstrated their technical expertise and ability to fulfill multiple tasks efficiently, the Customer also entrusted to Rishi Software Services(RSS) testing of their mobile solutions. RSS’s QA engineers performed the full cycle testing of adidas mobile apps for Android and iOS. The team elaborated on test cases to cover the maximum of the app use scenarios. Their activities included both manual and automated tests to check up the fitness suite’s performance, functional stability, and the overall apps’ usability.
Results
Having started with the Customer’s sports app analysis and code review, Rishi Software Services(RSS) gained adidas’ loyalty and handled numerous challenges that the company faced. RSS’s fitness app developers managed to restore the correct operation of the desktop app and set up a flawless synchronization process between different components of the fitness suite. Owing to the flexible approach to the Customer’s changing needs, Rishi Software Services(RSS) was able to augment their initial team to take up all stages of the project. Rishi Software Services(RSS) provided adidas with the assistance of highly qualified professionals, including, web developers, mobile app developers, UI specialists, and QA experts.
As a result of this productive cooperation, adidas managed to successfully release the new desktop application, improve the web app, as well as release the updated iOS and Android mobile apps. The project resulted in the stably increasing number of happy active users. Throughout the years, the fitness suite tailored by Rishi Software Services(RSS) became one of the most popular digital sports solutions on the market.
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