Notification and news app for citizens
Piran App?
The Piran municipality app was meant as a way to notify citizens about news, alerts and other notifications that might be of interest to a wider public.
The app features an interface for scrolling through the Piran website posts and a settings panel with the selection of the categories of interest for which a push notification will notify the user.
The app is 100% anonymous at the moment without the requirement of creating an account.
There are additional future improvements that are planned in conjunction with the public communal company.
The app is also available as a white label product to other municipalities or organizations.
The task at hand
The requirement was to create an app that would consume the website’s RSS feed and push these posts to app users.
The users should be able to tap the notification to open the post from the website to read. All this interactivity required a backend that manages subscriptions to the different categories.
Solution
We decided to use Flutter as the mobile framework as it enables developers to also compile to iOS with very little changes. At the time of development there was an issue with conflicting versions for FCM which was causing delays in the development. As it’s a very simple application we decided to implement it in native Android which wasn’t a problem as we agreed to implement Android only in the first phase.
We decided to use Flutter as the mobile framework as it enables developers to also compile to iOS with very little changes. At the time of development there was an issue with conflicting versions for FCM which was causing delays in the development. As it’s a very simple application we decided to implement it in native Android which wasn’t a problem as we agreed to implement Android only in the first phase.
The backend was developed using server-less technologies available on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Which at the same time was a very exciting and challenging. We used Terraform to describe the setup and Lambda with python for the API logic. The storage engine was DynamoDB. All the above services are currently using a fraction of the free tier quota only making the hosting expenses to be 0€.
Technologies
