The Client was providing churches with white-label church mobile apps for parishioners. The number of churches willing to launch such an app was growing, but the set-up grew too hard to maintain hence each church had a separate app. The need for optimization became obvious.
We transformed separate apps into a single church app platform easy to maintain & scale: rewrote the back-end from Ruby to PHP, introduced a new architecture for simultaneous updates of multiple apps, and optimized UI/UX. To date, the product serves 300+K users and 1500+ churches.
Product Owner of the Back to the Bible, Justin Manes, wanted to bring a substantial improvement to their white-label app and was looking for a professional team of custom mobile app developers that would bring this plan into a prosperous issue.
By the time he came to Sigma Software in 2018 with the idea, the solution was already 6 years old and combined 1000+ church apps for different parishes. Sigma Software team performed full mobile app backend architecture redesign to enable simultaneous and smooth updates of all apps. In addition, we also performed full UI re-design for better UX and modern look & feel of the apps.
By the time we started working on goTandem product, we had already experienced successful cooperation with the Back to the Bible Product Owner on other projects and were on top of mind as a trustful partner for support and development of the goTandem solution.
Started working as a team of 7 FTE, we ramped up to 19 FTE and delivered the first version of the product within 8 months. After the first release, the team continued its operations and delivered a product release every 2 weeks till the whole solution was fully redesigned.
The application is featured with a unique custom architecture that enables simultaneous & automated updates for all end-users even without App Store approval. For that to happen, we introduced a CD process for the web application backend that serves as a core of the mobile application, thus can be dynamically updated when needed.
As for the functionality, goTandem application offers a vast array of features aimed to help people discover themselves in religion and get a personalized experience with the Bible through the biblical content tailored to their unique needs, namely:
Arnie Cole
CEO
Back to the Bible
I had the best meeting ever with a head of the Anglican Denomination. He is an old guy like me but took it upon himself to download the app, had his entire leadership team download the app, and was amazed by how well it worked! He then had his leadership team meet on the functionality of our app and they loved how it works. They say that it is the best tool they have ever found to get people engaged in the Bible and that is exactly what they need since many of their members have 'moved beyond the Bible.' I know you work hard and your hard work is paying off in huge dividends. I am noticing a complete change from the past. Before, I had to explain how the app worked. Now, in almost all of my presentations people are telling me how well go Tandem works and the potential they see for their own usage. Thank you for your dedication.
Anhelina Korchakova
Project Manager
Sigma Software
This project is unique not only because of its social impact but also due to a very interesting technical challenge we successfully solved. Solution architecture design turned into a real quest, and I’m proud that our architects have envisioned an elegant solution that provides smooth and simultaneous updates on multiple individual apps.
