Music therapy app

Who Was the Client?

The company behind Music Care, a digital therapy app that uses music to help people with pain and anxiety. Patients and healthcare professionals choose a music session for a goal, such as better sleep, and listen to it on a phone or in the browser.

What Was the Client's Request for Collaboration?

The client came to us with an app for web, iOS and Android and many platform-specific bugs. Depending on the platform, audio stopped or cut out, a screen would not scroll, or a layout came out differently.

They asked us to fix the bugs and bring the app to one look.

What Is the Client's Bigger Business Goal?

The client was getting the app ready for real users. For the business, that meant three things:

• • A product people can rely on. Someone who opens a therapy app expects the session to play through. An app that fails on their device loses them.

• • Room to grow the audience. Web, iOS and Android are three ways to reach users. The client needed all three to hold up before putting the app in front of more people.

• • Development that moves forward. Time spent fixing the same kind of bug on each platform is time not spent on the product. The client wanted out of that loop.

At What Stage Was the Client's Project?

What the client had

• • An app for three platforms: web, iOS and Android

• • A backend already in place

• • An existing frontend codebase

• • A finished design

What Was Missing

• • Stability: features the client could count on across platforms

• • A common approach in the code: each platform's problems had been solved in their own way

• • A clear project structure to keep building on

What Was the Expected Outcome?

• • The platform bugs fixed

• • One look across the app

• • A product the client could keep developing without the same bugs coming back

How Was the Result Measured?

• • Adoption: 10K downloads on Google Play

• • Availability: the app is live on the App Store, Google Play and the web

• • Bug backlog: the platform bugs the client came with were resolved

How Did the Collaboration Work?

One frontend developer worked on the app for about three months, along three lines at once:

• • Bug fixing. We worked through the bugs as a continuous stream of fixes, so the client saw the app improve throughout the engagement.

• • Code standardization. Where each platform had been given its own solution, we replaced those with shared code.

• • Architecture. We organized the project so shared code and platform-specific code each have a clear place.

Improving an existing codebase without rewriting it

The app was already built, and the parts that worked had to keep working. A rewrite would have been the simpler engineering choice and the more expensive one for the client.

Solution: We first learned how the existing code worked, then changed it part by part, standardizing where it mattered and leaving stable parts alone.

A fix on one platform did not carry over to the others

Web, iOS and Android each handle some things in their own way, so a solution that worked on one could fail on the next.

Solution: We solved those cases per platform and kept the platform-specific parts small and separate from the shared code.