Case Study: How We Built a Cryptocurrency Price Tracker App criptoTickr
14 Dec 2017
6 Min
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Can you feel that smell of money? That's how cryptocurrency trading smells like. At the moment of writing, the cost of Bitcoin almost reaches a value of $16,700 while it's sibling Bitcoin Cash exceeds $1,800. If you want to benefit from it, you should not only catch the moment but keep an eye on the exchange rates and latest news in this field all the time.
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In this article, we'll tell you about how we developed an app that allows users both track the exchange rates of all popular cryptocurrencies and be aware of the news about them.
Story behind the idea of cryptoTickr
Our client came to us with the purpose to create an app that is able to track cryptocurrency rates. After the market analysis, he came to the conclusion that Android dominates in this niche with hundreds of advanced apps, while iOS has a relatively small number of solutions with certain limitations in functionality. That's how the decision for iOS app development was taken.
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The cryptoTickr app is capable of tracking rates of any popular cryptocurrencies, as well as give it's users an opportunity to watch for their crypto portfolios.
What's special about cryptoTickr?
The app has an easy-to-use and intuitive interface. Let's consider the main features of cryptoTickr in details.
Home
The home screen contains the preset list of the most popular cryptocurrencies. On this screen, users are able to see the price changes by hours (1h, 24h, 7h), as well as track the increase or decrease of price on a certain cryptocurrency in percents or switch it to dollars and vice versa. In case a user hasn't found the cryptocurrency he or she wants to see on the home screen, it's possible to add one by tapping on 'Add to watchlist'.
cryptoTickr app: Home screen and Add to watchlist
By the way, if to tap on a currency from the home screen, a user gets to the section with charts and news.
cryptoTickr app: Charts & News
Portfolio
In this section, users can track their profit from purchasing certain cryptocurrency. They're able to enter the price for which it was bought, as well as the number of coins they bought. In turn, the app will calculate how much money the user spent and gained in percentage terms.
cryptoTickr app: My Portfolio
Trending
This section shows the list of cryptocurrencies that went up and down in value most of all. Users can track these changes by the hour.
cryptoTickr app: Trending
Alarm
Alarm allows users to set an alert that notifies them as soon as the chosen cryptocurrency will go above, below or equal to the entered price value.
cryptoTickr app: Alarm
How we approached this project
Any project in our company starts from estimation and planning stages to let our customers know how much time the development will take, as well as how much money it will cost.
Estimation
In Cleveroad, we usually conduct rough and detailed estimation. The first one is needed to provide customers with an approximate figures and give some time for reflection. If a customer agrees to cooperate, we conduct the detailed estimation to give him or her the exact figures. When estimating this project we were faced with an issue connected with API responsible for getting the latest data. This issue increased the total development time, but the fact it was timely detected helped us to avoid further problems.
Planning stage
At this stage, we clarify all details, determine the scope of work, write user stories and technical requirements. Each project has it's own project manager that coordinates the whole process of development between the participants to reach the highest efficiency. On this stage, we also create a calendar plan where we clarify when each stage of development should be finished. Besides, we distribute the resources for each stage and the project in general.
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Design stage
On this stage, our UI/UX designers create wireframes to show a customer how his or her app will look like. As soon as the customer confirms that he or she is satisfied by the wireframe, designers move to UI design. It's worth mentioning that on this stage our designers proposed to the client to add one more feature called 'News' that is responsible for collecting news about cryptocurrencies. Our customer liked that idea and decided to add it to the app. The development begins when all the organizational details are settled and design is approved by the customer.
The development stage of cryptoTickr
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Platform: iOS Programming languages: Swift, Node.js Third-party services: CoinMarketCap
Since our customer wanted to cover the lack of crypto tracking apps on iOS, the project was focused only on this platform. Respectively, Swift was chosen as the main language for mobile development, while Node.js served as the language for backend development. In total, in this project took part two developers -- 1 iOS developer and 1 backend developer.
One of the main tasks of criptoTickr is to allow it's customers to track cryptocurrency prices that are constantly changing. That's why we needed a stable and reliable solution that could cover our needs of getting the latest and most accurate data. This solution was the CoinMarketCap API.
As I've already mentioned, we had some difficulties connected with this API. The point is, none of the APIs we've considered for this project weren't able to cover all our needs. That's why except for dealing with API we had to write a parser that took some extra time.
The testing stage
The software testing is an integral part of any development process. It's barely possible to create a top-notch product without testing it on the presence of bugs and other issues. Our QA engineers wrote several scripts to automate the testing process that allowed us to reach the best efficiency and correct bugs before the release.
Project handover
This project was quite interesting and we did our best to satisfy the requirements of our customer and provide him with the top-notch product. In general, the process of development took us 6 weeks.
If you have an idea for mobile or web app and you need a reliable IT company to build it -- contact our managers to learn all the details. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get our latest articles and videos to your email once a week.
Evgeniy Altynpara is a CTO and member of the Forbes Councils’ community of tech professionals. He is an expert in software development and technological entrepreneurship and has 10+years of experience in digital transformation consulting in Healthcare, FinTech, Supply Chain and Logistics
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