jācapps

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Relevant Radio is a talk-radio network for the Catholic life. Since December of 2000, Relevant Radio® has been helping people bridge the gap between faith and everyday life through informative, entertaining, and interactive programming twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week. The Relevant Radio network recently announced its intent to merge with Immaculate Heart Radio and will be serving the Church with 110 stations reaching 39 states, with a potential listening audience of 133 million people.

I am the director of global digital messaging. I basically help with covering the website, our mobile app and social media.

What challenge were you trying to address with jācapps?

In 2013, we wanted to create an app that could serve as a useful instrument for people to further their listening. People had been mainly listening to our station on their car radios, but we found that an app would increase supplemental listening, either for our live stream or radio archives. It would bridge the gap in a unique way since many people don’t have radios in the same sense as in the past. We were looking for a good app developer to work with and narrowed down the list.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We were only looking for an app, initially, and we fit nicely within the V3 version of jācapps’ solution, which was used by many other talk-radio stations at the time. The main features would have been live streaming and audio archives.

We switched to the V4 platform, which gave us a few more offerings. We were looking to separate ourselves from the field, since it seemed that there were other Catholic talk apps out there. The current version of the app is custom and offers people a more dynamic experience, visually and content-wise. We offer a few functions that unique to us. Our main menu has the traditional offerings of most media apps, but, on the right side, there is a Pray Resources menu with audio recordings of varying lengths, based on how much time people have. Most of the content on the right side can be downloaded on users’ phones and accessed without an internet connection. We also have a function called Confession Helper, which helps people prepare their confessions. Being in the middle of a church tends not to give the best internet connection, so accessing those resources offline extends the usefulness of our app, and we’re always looking to see what’s in it for people, and how they can get the most out of it.

How did you come to work with jācapps?

They were recommended to us. Word of mouth is important, and other radio stations we were aware of were using jācapps as well and were pleased with the relationship. After having an interview, we felt comfortable that jācapps would do a great job. Thus far, they have.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with jācapps in October of 2012. We launched the first version of the app in February 2013.The work is ongoing. 

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We track our keyword performance using Sensor Tower. In order to find our app on any app store, a user would most likely search for the word “Catholic”. For this term, since the release of our 3.2 version on iOS, we’re currently ranked at number 10, out of around 2,700 Catholic apps on the market. This is sensational and has been improving over the years. Our highest ranking was around one month ago when we came to be the number-two Catholic app. With each version we’ve upgraded to, we continue to climb in those particular charts.

Over the course of 2013, there were 300,000 downloads. We have marketed the app using Facebook ads and such. We use Localytics for our metrics and have 42,000 to 50,000 monthly active users. The majority of our audience is in the US, but we do have an international audience in the Philippines, which is an extremely Catholic nation, with around 90% of the population belonging to the religion. We have around 100,000 users there. We’re also popular in Canada, and have a presence in most countries around the Earth which allow people to download the app.

How did jācapps perform from a project management standpoint?

Their customer service has always been over the top. In particular, on the July 4th weekend we had an issue with the app, and I was thinking that we’d be sunk. I sent jācapps an email, and was shocked to receive a fast response, and receive a solution one hour later. jācapps are extremely professional and very easy to work with over the phone or through email.

What did you find most impressive about jācapps?

It’s rare to see this level of responsiveness, especially in the tech side of the world. jācapps has been fantastic to work with.

Are there any areas jācapps could improve?

Nothing comes to mind.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with jācapps?

For taking an app into the next level and having a more customized route, jācapps is fantastic to collaborate with, and make a vision become reality.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

WDET is a public radio station in Detroit. I am the associate director of product development and business operations. I manage the team responsible for maintaining the usability, health, and security of our online platforms and broadcasting hardware. This includes our mobile app, website, and all of the automation software we’re using for broadcasting.

What challenge were you trying to address with jācapps?

We wanted to build a mobile application to serve the diversity of our content. We’re a split-format station—half music and half news—so listeners have different behaviors. During a survey, 51% of respondents said they listened to us outside of the radio dial, either streaming on our website or through third-party apps. Providing our own mobile app would be crucial to serving listeners’ needs. Also, we don’t currently use opportunities to deliver advertisements, but we could potentially monetize our own app, as well as get analytics from users. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

jācapps initially created a custom app for us before moving to their own V4 Radio App. We made the decision to switch based on maintenance needs. We’re no longer paying hourly rates for creating new functionalities for our own app, and we can benefit from all the new components being created for stations around the country.

How did you come to work with jācapps?

The decision to work with jācapps was made prior to my start at the company, but I believe that it was based on the knowledge of other media organizations using the platform. Our current general manager met a founder from jācapps at a conference and went from there.

How much have you invested with jācapps?

I don’t know the exact number. We pay an annual maintenance fee of around $4,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The collaboration with jācapps predates my time here, but I believe we switched to the new platform in 2015. 

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?

With the custom app, we weren’t making any changes unless there would be a crash or we needed an operating system update. The V4 platform allows us to stay on the curve. iOS came up with a new version, which caused our app to malfunction. If we’d been managing it ourselves, we would have gone into crisis mode and worked with jācapps’ developer to get it back up. We would have probably been competing for attention with all their other clients. The V4 platform supports a sweeping improvement from which all users can benefit.

We are sometimes inhibited from making custom changes like branding elements and stylistic details. The main reason people open the app is to stream our content, but the player does not have very robust functionalities. One thing we are lacking, compared to the original app, is the ability to see what’s playing at the moment. We would like the ability to upload an XML file with this information or use products like NPR’s Composer. There are some challenges which we can’t work around without hiring developers.

We track crashes for Apple devices, which are a bit more frequent—about 60 per month, compared to 2 per month on Android. We have around 2,500 users on iOS.

How did jācapps perform from a project management standpoint?

jācapps’ team is very helpful. I’ve worked with 3 different customer reps since the beginning, and each has been very responsive. We’ve reinstated our fiduciary, which involves certain procedures for updating the application. jācapps has been more than willing to be flexible, and they’ve always gotten clarification on our needs and requirements.

What did you find most impressive about jācapps?

Their responsiveness is key. On some occasions, we had podcast launches that needed to be uploaded to the app but only made visible at a certain date. jācapps had no problem assisting us, and they’ve been accessible overall.

We would appreciate having our own CMS for making changes to the app’s content in terms of links, RSS feeds, and so on. Even without this ability, it’s easy to work with jācapps.

Are there any areas jācapps could improve?

The aesthetics and some user functionalities on the app could be improved. We would like having a static player while navigating through the app, which would show users what they’re listening to. Listening is our main function, and the app’s functionalities tend to be a bit clunky and basic. I would also like the ability to like and share content on the app.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with jācapps?

A lean organization that doesn’t have development as a part of its core services will benefit from jācapps’ product. We don’t necessarily need the knowledge for building and maintaining it and can focus on managing the content. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a broadcast company with approximately 24 websites across the United States. I’m the VP of the digital products division, leading the team that builds and maintains all of our digital products.

What challenge were you trying to address with Jacapps?

We contracted Jacapps to build out our “Where Hip-Hop Lives” mobile application. It is a hip-hop lifestyle app that includes that includes two of our top radio brands and streaming components inside of this lifestyle app. There are a lot of app developers out there, but very few that really understand how to handle live streaming. Jacapps certainly has radio knowledge, so they were eager and able to help us build out this lifestyle app and include the streaming component.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We developed for both domestic and international distribution across both iOS and Android. Our initial iteration in our international iteration included the subscription piece. Listening requires the user to be an authenticated subscriber. That was an important component and one that they were able to facilitate for us.

There are currently four streaming stations inside of the app. Two of them are direct simulcasts from our LA and New York hip-hop stations, and the other two are stream-only stations—there is no simulcast other than what we run on both iOS and Android. The remaining content is aggregated across all of our video, on-demand audio, and written content. It’s a companion piece for our broadcast entities.

We did intend to release for both iOS and Android at the same time. We built iOS first, knowing that it’s the harder platform to get approved on, and then very quickly released Android right after it. Both officially hit the market at the same time.

How did you come to work with Jacapps?

They were recommended to me by my boss, who I believe had worked with them in the past. I don’t have any more context on that than they were recommended, and after a review, we agreed that they were the right company to partner with. I had previously built out mobile apps with a company that I had worked for before this, so I was already aware of what the market offered. After understanding what they could do, I was confident with this decision.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April and May 2015. This is probably the best feature of working with them is that they’re very nimble and move very quickly. We had a very aggressive timeline. We had an event that we were trying to release at, so we did ground up about seven weeks in total from the time that we were able to provide our scope document to release, which is pretty impressive.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The app is now in its third version domestically (technically, it’s 2.5). We have several hundred thousand downloads of the app today. That’s all-inclusive of the three versions. The platform is solid, and they are very nimble. Making updates doesn’t feel like you’re building from the ground up again. We can build on top of where we’re at, and it doesn’t feel like we’re rebuilding our app every time we want to do a release.

How did Jacapps perform from a project management standpoint?

The project manager assigned to our project was very communicative. We spoke several times during the week. There was no part of the process that I felt like we were in the dark about. They were quick with new builds when we needed it. We were quick with getting UATs [user acceptance testing] back with them, so I thought all-in-all, given our aggressive timeline, we worked pretty well together.

It ended up being just one-to-one, the project manager and myself, both working with a pretty lean team. The two of us were the ones connecting, and we met weekly to go over the progress and where we’re at, and kept the communication going. If there were other things we needed to get addressed, we had breakout calls.

What did you find most impressive about Jacapps?

What they’ve done better than other vendors I’ve worked with in the past for mobile development is that they were very communicative and quick. Oftentimes, for a development project like this, the scope slides and suddenly something that was supposed to be 12 weeks to deliver is now six or eight months. They kept on track, keeping us true to the original scope, to make sure that we didn’t go off the rails where it wasn’t necessary. They delivered the product we needed in the timeline that we needed it.

Are there any areas Jacapps could improve?

No. The product directive was written from us, and they delivered exactly what we asked for.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with Jacapps?

We didn’t necessarily need it, but I would say their experience in the space could certainly help a company who’s not quite sure what they want out of their mobile app. They could help refine a vision or find requirements for a less experienced company.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the founder and CEO of Super Radio Media Group. We are the creators of the Super Radio USA mobile app.

For what projects/services did your company hire jācapps?

We needed a single, elegant mobile app which contained all our company-owned internet radio stations in one place for our listeners and advertisers.

What were your goals for this project?

Since we don’t have any traditional radio stations, we needed an easy-to-use app to market the growing personality internet radio audience. We wanted to start only with national content but required the flexibility to adapt to audience growth in specific locations.

How did you select this vendor?

A member of our executive team worked with this vendor in the past.

Describe the project in detail.

jācapps set up a player for nine or more internet-only radio stations. This included the main radio stream of each station as well as the side content such as podcasts, web articles, promotions, and region-specific advertising.

What was the team composition?

They assigned a team of four people for the project.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The app is exactly what we wanted and exactly what was promised by the vendor. We are very pleased.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow was seamless. The project took several months as the launch was delayed due to changes in the number of stations available for the app.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Every team member I worked with was extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I only ask that they keep up the great work.