OpenXcell

BACKGROUND

Can you provide a brief description of what your company does?

We are a design studio. We have operated for 80 years in the national market. We are from Portugal. Now, we are venturing into the app world. We started developing a suite of apps. We didn’t have the development skills and engineering capability within our company. We are designers with a lot of interface design, user experience, and other processes along those lines. However, we didn’t have engineering technology to develop and implement our application projects.

We started online research on Google and similar sites. We started to talk with OpenXcell and many other companies. We talked to many Indian-based companies whose portfolio, price, and work meshed with us. We started to work about a year ago on this app project with them.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What makes OpenXcell stand out compared to the other developers?

The project was challenging because we want to create some complex apps. The first app has already been released. They are now working on another app that is more complex than the first one. We started a second app because we were happy with the results of our partnership with the first app. We choose them because we have a specific budget limit. We received many proposals and we thought that OpenXcell was the company that offered the best quality compared to price.

SOLUTION

Is the application available just for iOS?

For now, yes. We’re planning to expand it to Android at the end of the year because we want to finish our set of apps for iOS first. When all the apps we want to develop are ready, we will start porting for Android.

Did OpenXcell mainly work on the backend development?

Yes, they did engineering during development and implementation. The user experience, design and all front end aspects were designed by our team. OpenXcell only engineered it, which is essential.

Can you provide a general cost estimate for the project?

For the iOS app, the development was about $8,000. It’s hard to know the exact cost because there were so many things that we added later in the process.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How happy are you with the results so far?

I’m pretty happy. On a scale of one to ten, I give an eight.

How has the app been received?

We are really happy with the results in the App store. The app was launched in January and has been available for about three months. We already have five hundred thousand users. We are doing pretty well so far.

We are happy because we already reached half a million users in less than three months. Part of the success is due to successful marketing but OpenXcell deserves considerable credit for the quality of their development. 

When working with OpenXcell, is there anything that you found to be unique or special compared to other developers that you’ve worked with?

This is the first offshore development team that we hired. Usually, we work very closely with teams for Web development because we are a design studio. We had many Web projects before where we worked in close physical proximity with partners.

This case was a totally new experience. We are pretty satisfied with it. Communication is great. They are available every day on Skype and email. They have a platform for project management. We do some bug reporting and they fix it. We are more than satisfied with the quality.

Is there anything that you would do differently or think that they could improve upon?

 We are a client that likes to discuss the small details on a project, such as technical details regarding implementation. Sometimes, we worked on something and they had problems implementing. While they are searching for a solution, they don’t always communicate with us and tell us the problem. They just try to solve it as soon as possible.

Sometimes that can be a good thing but not always. We liked to be involved in every technical aspect of the app. We are working together. We evolve together. That’s the only thing we are not fully satisfied with, but we are not unhappy. It was fine overall.

Would you recommend OpenXcell to a colleague?

Yes, I definitely would.