Ben Mobile

Ben

Control your mobile plan and never spend more than you need.

Purpose

Ben's target audience was those who had a much tighter budget in their lives, and wanted more control over how much they pay for their phone and internet services. To serve their customers with this vision in mind, they needed a portal through which they can have that control, and from that need the Ben Mobile app took shape.

Responsibilities

When I joined the project a lot had already been done and the mobile app was close to going live. The library of choice was React Native, partly due to our company's expertise with React but also because there were no native components necessary to deploy the iOS and Android teams on. As such, we could use React Native to serve all customers.

This was my first React Native project, but already there were major issues that I needed to tackle. For one, the navigation was poorly implemented, so whenever someone needed to make a bundle adjustment, they would struggle to get to where they needed to be. The root of the issue was that the Navigation Stack was not implemented correctly, so I dedicated an entire week of my onboarding to refactor it. Once the refactor was done, users could go from A to B and back to A smoothly. I included internal documentation to ensure future developers would understand the logic and gave an internal presentation as well.

Following that, a bunch of features needed to be finalized. There was already a strong backend component, so it was really about making sure that the data translated visually to what needed to be done. I helped build out the visual tile and circular indicators on the main screen, built the settings screen and correlated functionality, and rendered all invoices in the Mijn Facturen page. I also supported my colleagues on the Bundle upgrade functionality as well.

Once these features were completed, the app was shipped. A few iterations would follow afterwards to fix any early bugs, implement the chatbot, and make small visual adjustments. Afterwards, the project was handed over to a new consulting company in an effort to lower the cost of maintenance.

Overall, I enjoyed the challenges the product introduced. It was the perfect way to experience building apps in React Native, although making style adjustments could take hours due to us not having a good hot-loading mechanism and not being built on Expo. But the experience of rendering data, building pages, building unique interfaces and getting used to the new styling capabilities in React Native at the time was exciting.