BENCH is out now — an app that helps you quickly find benches near you, save your favourites, and find directions to your next place to sit! 📲
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/bench/id6749592730
🥙 -🪑 = 🤔
I never thought I’d need a bench-finder app until the other day. I was at a food truck with a friend, we picked up two excellent falafel wraps… and then immediately found ourselves asking: “Okay, but where do we sit?” 🥙
Bench helps you quickly find benches near you, powered by the Bench team’s verified database.
🚀 I’m proud to have led the iOS team through our first big launch. I picked up the existing code-base and had a couple of months to get it ready to ship in the App Store! No small task given that there was a huge backlog of bugs as well as UI fixes required across the board. Furthermore the key functionality of the app wasn’t working consistently, and users weren’t always able to find benches in their local area!
We did a lot of ruthless prioritisation to workout what was feasible before launch. Beyond just squashing bugs and cleaning up the UI I had a feeling we could leverage Core Data as a local cache to dramatically speed up the overall UX of the app and reduce the team’s Firebase bill! 🔥
This turned out to be true! 🛠️ It took a few days to hammer out the details and fine tune our usage of Core Data to be performant, but it was worth it in the end. By caching the user’s local dataset we were able to reduce the latency in the app AND call Firebase less often. Resulting in a faster app and a smaller Firebase bill. 🔥
As well as the performance optimisations, we had a good chance to tidy up the code-base and refactor components. Initially this slowed us down but it paid dividends in the months that followed as we were able to quickly iterate on our streamlined components, and fixing components in one place fixed them across the app.
Overall it has been a great project, beyond just the bug fixes and polish it has been some really enjoyable work on performance optimisation — using Core Data to dramatically cut down Firebase calls, making the end-user experience super snappy. 💨
🤩 Working with the Bench team has been great. Let us know how it’s working for you, and we’re looking forward to rolling out more updates soon! 🔜