Thulium is an omnichannel CRM service, providing clients with a solution that allows them to handle multiple contact channels – phone, e-mail, chat, helpdesk, and messenger. Thulium’s cloud-based call center solution makes it easier for clients to serve their customers quickly and efficiently from one platform.

CHALLENGE Displaying content on a smartphone screen is not easy, since the size of the screen is limited and not everything can be displayed. Whenever someone used the app to send a message with an attachment, table, or image, it wouldn’t display properly on the recipient's end. It wasn't easy to find a solution which would make all of the messages comfortable and easy to read.

Our team has faced two different challenges. First, fixing the messaging issue and second, choosing the most suitable technology to develop the front-end and back-end of the app at the same time.

SOLUTION & TECHNOLOGY Swagger was used on the back-end of the app. Thanks to this, we can easily respond to changes in the API. Swagger auto-generates a description of the API, then in turn makes it possible to detect any discrepancies between the front-end implementation and shape of the objects returned by the back-end. What is more, by reading the API’s structure, Swagger can automatically build a complete and interactive API documentation. It can also generate client libraries and create automated tests for your API.

Storybook was used to build UI components besides the API. All states and aspects of the interface could be created using Storybook.

Thanks to React Native, we were able to create an app compatible with both Android and iOS. The alternative would be to create two separate apps: an Android version in Java or Kotlin and iOS version in objective C or Swift. It would be more time-consuming and expensive to do, as well as more costly to support in the long-term. Using React Native, we only needed to develop one app, which offers identical features in both systems.

An additional advantage of React Native is that it offers open-source libraries of components to utilize in your development process. For Thulium, we used a lot of Native functionalities, such as camera access, saving files on the device, push notifications, sharing data in other applications, etc. Once again, this saved time and money during the app’s development.