Building an app for Africa's largest recruitment portal

In South Africa, and indeed the rest of Africa, mobile phones have become a critical piece of technology not only for personal communication, but also for business purposes. The majority of South Africans only access the Internet via their mobile phones and this stands true for many other African countries as well. Without a mobile phone, they would be isolated from both local and global marketplaces. As a result, for key service providers and online platforms, providing a seamless way to access services on mobile phones - and particularly on the more common models and operating systems - is absolutely essential.

Indeed, this is why Careers24, a leading African online recruitment portal, approached Bluegrass Digital to design and build an app that would perform well across all operating systems including iOS, Android and Blackberry, whilst being easily maintainable under one codebase. It was essential that the app could work smoothly on older smartphone models such as Blackberry 6 (that remains very popular in many African countries).

To overcome this challenge, the team at Bluegrass Digital decided to build an app in a hybrid fashion (using Phonegap) - as opposed to building a native app for each platform (which greatly increases development and maintenance time/costs) - that in theory allows for one codebase to be maintained and allows deployment to multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry). During the build, the team had to branch away from the main codebase, into two sub-branches to accommodate for Blackberry-specific configurations - as these devices could not handle the animations being used on iOS/Android and various other issues.

For more on the project visit (www.bluegrassdigital.com/blog/2014/february/4/careers-24-app-development) and to view the app in action (www.careers24.com/download/).

For further info contact:
Melanie Esterhuizen
moc.latigidssargeulb@einalem
www.bluegrassdigital.com