Retail Application Framework – How and Why?

Within few years into existence, iPhone Appstore has witnessed a deluge of applications. Some of them were able to capture the fancy of the consumers while others failed miserably. Still, the iPhone applications are being developed incessantly all across the globe. The question is – Are we going to frantically create applications one after the other? Or, do we need to delve deeper into the technology and touch the real essence of it? The answer was for us to explore and we did that.

When we decided to enter iPhone application development business early this year, we decided not to follow the fad but do what we do the best i.e. understand the new technology to the core and develop which is never been developed. We decided to combine our technological insight with our business acumen and create a highly economical framework which will make development easier, cheaper and efficient. In pursuit of the above stated objectives we performed a thorough market analysis for quite some time. The idea to create retail experience on iPhone caught our attention. We did rigorous research on the retail domain front and our study concluded that retail applications have an immense potential to capture the market like none other. It was a beginning of our three month Retail framework development voyage.

A framework, the way we understand it is, a set of basic functionalities which can be “Cosmetic”ised in any desired way to create multiple applications and on multiple domains of similar nature. For example a retail framework can be used for developing application for FMCG, Pharmacies, Sports product retailers etc. with minimum effort, cost and time. The crux of all the above mentioned applications is the same, i.e. to display items in form of categories, subcategories so on; allow users to select item of choice for purchase, payment for the purchased items. As far as pharmacy is concerned, we recognized that managing prescriptions and selection of pharmacy stores through maps (as compared to orthodox selection methods) are the basic requirements of a pharmacy application. Thereon, we began developing these basic features in form of plug-in plug-out modules. This modality gave our framework unique flexibility because the modules had their own identity and robustness and ability to stand alone. Any other effort will only be in the form of writing wrappers over and above this framework.

Today, we can create retail application within such short period of time which is hard to even conceive. Strength of the framework lies not only in the performance in the technical sense per se but its efficiency in the economic sense as well. To answer our skeptics, the framework has the ability to emphatic ally minimize implementation cost by 70%. In future, we aspire to create many more technically and economically efficient frameworks like Retail framework on iPhone and other platforms like Blackberry, android and windows mobile as well.