Mobomo was honored to speak at the first ever MoDevGov! A mobile development conference “focused solely on the government,” attendees gathered to hear various speakers discuss solutions created for the government, and solutions yet to be developed. Our own COO, Brian Lacey, gave a crowd-pleasing speech on our recent work for the Navy. Brian, who led our Official Navy App initiative, outlined exactly what launching a multi-device experience for America’s sailors entailed.
A few highlights below:
Purpose:
- Keeping Our Soldiers Close: built the app as an outreach tool to connect sailors and their families with relevant and updated content on the status of the Navy
- Target audiences: 1) the sailor, 2) their families & loved ones, 3) general interested public
Challenges:
Content:
- The Navy has huge amounts of content coming in from around the globe. Each base, fleet, and carrier group all have their own public facing blogs, websites, social media, and content that they wanted to bring together into one app
- It’s all fragmented: located across different sources and in a variety of different platforms such an internal CMS, WordPress, etc.
- We were tasked with compiling and syncing content and parsing it back out in a usable format for different devices
- We needed to uncover the best methodology to push content to various OSes and different viewports
- Feeds posed a significant challenge: Navy has its flagship news sources, like Navy.mil, but they also wanted a platform where they could add in feeds from around the fleet
API:
- In order to deliver the content to the various audiences and device types, we needed to process it into a format that any device/platform could consume
- The most critical piece for our app was the API layer: we opted to treat mobile devices as presentation layers
- We needed to create a quick, easy-to-use interface for updating and maintaining the app
Interactive Map:
- Update force deployments
- Dynamically changing maps points
- Ability to add start and kill dates to the app
And all of this had to be deployed on:
- iOS universal build (both iPhone and iPad)
- Android universal build (phone, 7-inch, and 10-inch tablets)
- Windows tablets (like the Surface)
- Chromebook app for sailors and families without mobile devices
And we built it. And Navy loved it. To see the finished product, check out our portfolio or check out Navy’s official announcement!
