About Client
The client is the owner of 180 oil filling stations based out of Oman. It has been a leading distributor of petroleum products and related services across Oman for 50+ years. The company has a well-known network of service stations and with the help of capital investment, it has developed services easily accessible even for the most remote parts of the country. The service stations of the client provide essential supplies required by the nation and its citizens. Besides petroleum, it also offers convenience stores, auto services, smart card services, and aircraft refuelling.
The main aim of the client is to work closely with the appropriate authorities to ensure no harm to the environment. In addition, the client provides environmentally-friendly products and services to consumers. With the goal of a sustainable future, the company has been working on innovation, reliability, and sustainability.
The Challenge
The client, being one of the major distributors of petroleum products in Oman, wanted a cross-platform, efficient and official app for its customers.
The client already owned a native app with limited features and faced the below challenges:
- The license expiration date differs from user to user. Therefore, the app needed to store the vehicle and mileage data and with so much data on the fly, it was difficult to handle the data storage and send notifications to the users
- The application was native. It had to be cross-platform with an appealing user interface to be more user friendly
- The customers needed more useful features along with proper filters and sub-filters to narrow down the long list of filling stations to allow users to select ones in their area easily.
The client wanted the new application to offer information of the nearest filling stations, facilities available at the stations and a reminder of the expiration date of the driver’s license to the users/customers.
The Solution
01.
Our developers solved the problem of handling large vehicle and mileage data by creating a local SQLite DB that could handle huge data loads.
02.
The customers were to be notified of the upcoming expiration of their driving license by studying the provided vehicle information. Our programmers employed Android Local Push Notifications—Alarm Manager to set the expiration notification.
03.
Our developers made the searches easy. Now users can narrow down the search for the nearest filling station based on region/location and further filter those searches based on services/features/facilities provided (such as car wash, public utilities, gas filling, etc.) by those filling stations. The developers used SQL query with app code to manage complex filters.
04.
The app had to look user-friendly and interactive, so to upgrade the mood and visual style the team set a color palette including various shades of gray with light colors. Our designers put together several mood boards to define the app’s visual style better.
05.
In addition, the mobile app was also integrated with features such as information about the client’s products, services, and facilities available at their filling stations.
06.
The users can view and participate in the client’s upcoming events and ongoing promotions as well as provide feedback for product/services improvement through the app.
