A leading company in the smart home domain had developed smart sensors for consumers. They now wanted to build a mobile app solution that would enable their consumers to connect the smart sensors to the users home Wi-Fi and provide alerts to the users in the form of push notifications whenever an event like a water leak or if a smoke alarm went off. The app would also let users customize the smart sensors features.
iLeaf Solutions was chosen by our client to build a highly secure and optimized mobile app solution that would ensure smooth on-boarding and effortless connection of the smart sensors to the users WiFi and it also alerts the users
These were some of the interesting challenges our app development team tackled during the course of development and support of the system.
In order to connect the smart sensors to the users home WiFi we had to integrate the SoftAp and Sound provisioning methods into our mobile app. This posed with connectivity issues we had to deal with.
One of the things that the client was very particular about was the level of security that both the app and cloud demanded. Post the development our expert team of security analysts conducted penetration tests to figure out security holes in the system and we had to address those as well.
Down the line as the number of customers increased and the number of white labelled versions of the smart home solution increased, scalability became a point of concern. After thorough analysis we decided to move to a different cloud provider. Hence, the migration of the data of around 30K users became an interesting challenge our development team had to handle.
We used React Native as the development platform to develop this application. In order to tackle the challenges that were posed, after some thorough ideation process we came up with the following solutions.
After some thorough analysis and brainstorming we realized the fact that we had to handle the smart sensor provisioning mechanism natively on both iOS and Android platforms. We had to write separate codes for both iOS and Android in order to overcome the compatibility issues.
Our team of security analysts found security issues on both the mobile app side as well on the backend. In order to make the system highly secure the measures that were took can be summarized below.
Due to scalability issues we had to move to a different cloud platform and this is where the migration of over 30k users became a point of concern. We decided to develop migration apis where in when an existing user logs into the updated version of the app. The migration api would be called and all the user data would be migrated from the old cloud to the new cloud provider. Till the user was logged in we made sure that the user received push notifications when a water leak occurred or if a smoke alarm went off and for such events.
We dealt with the connectivity issues that occurred with new OS releases by ensuring thorough testing of the app from the release of the beta version of the new OS. Both automation and manual testing methods are employed for this.
React Native, VSCode, Google Cloud Platform, NodeJS, Xcode, Android Studio, Sourcetree
Since the app was targeted towards consumers, we used a very simple UI in order to make the on-boarding and WiFi connection mechanism of smart sensors as smooth as possible. Within a time span of 6 months we were able to complete the development of a highly secure smart home mobile app. We were able to manage the successful migration of all the users as well.
