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Simple to set up. Easy to use. Powerful integrations.
Get free accessWe decided to completely rebuild and relaunch our iOS mobile application. This decision wasn’t made lightly, and involved many months of deep engineering work.
The end result — we hope — is a more delightful mobile app experience for our customers.
Greater reliability
Faster app performance
A more beautiful and intuitive design
We want our customers to have high visibility into our product and organization. This is why we reconstructed our iOS app from the ground-up.
And a good place to start…
Why is a Mobile App Important?
Fair question.
We know that for years, traditional business phones were physically tethered to a workstation. You were able to make and receive calls when you were at the office, and when you were away, voicemail would catch what you missed.
But this isn’t how modern businesses operate anymore.
The idea of a traditional office is quickly fading. Even before Covid forced many companies to pivot to remote operations, many forward-thinking brands allowed their teams to work flexibly from home or in an entirely distributed model. This is a clear use case for a cloud-based phone system that only requires a stable internet connection to function.
Moreover, the desire for greater mobility doesn’t stop at work-from-home. Our smartphones have become powerful computers in their own right, and as a result, important business tools.
In fact, we surveyed our mobile users earlier in 2020 about why they like having a mobile app option. Users said they liked the app’s functionality for when desktop computers or other hardware wasn’t available — mobile apps gave them a second option to remain “online.” Also, they could work without adhering to a designated workstation.
Essentially, mobile apps increased availability.
And especially for external-facing teams, like sales and support, availability is everything. Missed calls foster resentment when your customers need help now, and sales teams will lose deals if they aren’t able to act when the zero-moment arrives.
This is why a functional, reliable mobile application is so important. Being able to receive calls to your work number (on your personal phone) creates opportunities to succeed, whereas before there was only silence.
As a business tool, Aircall’s mobile applications aren’t a 100% replacement for the robust desktop and browser-based apps, but they’re an important supplemental tool that allow support and sales representatives to continue doing their best work.
Why We Rebuilt our iOS Mobile App
We recognized from the very beginning the importance of mobile applications for modern brands.
And so we build iOS and Android applications to support our customers’ needs. We included key functionalities and launched mobile apps that met users’ expectations.
But time always necessitates change.
While the app was stable, our core product continued growing. More integrations, more features, and better code were implemented.
If we wanted our iOS mobile app to continue scaling at the same pace, the structure needed to be rebuilt in a way that would make for easy and stable additions.
If we didn’t go back and start from scratch, the product might not have met our customers’ expectations. Reliability, usability, and functionality are the most important aspects of a voice platform — to deliver on these promises, we had to essentially re-pour our house’s foundation.
What to Expect From the New iOS Mobile App
The new iOS app is built with three main improvements:
Better call quality and app reliability
Faster functionality
Improved user interface and experience
From a technical perspective, the iOS app was originally built using Clean Architecture in a UIKit ecosystem, which worked, but in a way that made it difficult to scale the app’s functionality without risks like crashing and poor quality.
The new iOS app is built using SwiftUI and Combine, which creates a new way of thinking about our app infrastructure. It produces a stable framework from which we can more easily and safely add functionalities while keeping the app fast and reliable.
You may notice a few features available on the desktop app and old iOS mobile app aren’t there anymore. However, the new framework we mentioned has made the application more trustworthy in the short term and more adaptable in the long term. Don’t worry — these features are coming soon!
Quality and Customer Centricity are Our ‘True North’
Relaunching our iOS mobile app wasn’t easy or quick, and it’s the result of many months of hard work from our engineering team. While some of the updates will be apparent, like an improved user-interface, the most important ones — we hope — won’t be noticed at all.
That is to say, the call quality, app speed, and failure rates will be exactly what you’d expect from a modern, intuitive, and intelligent business phone system.
Addressing our product’s technical foundations is a big step forward. We encourage you to experience the new iOS app for yourself!
Published on September 28, 2020.
