Creating a Mobile Training Diary for Professional Athletes
Description
A Norwegian software provider partnered with Altoros to build and scale a mobile part of its application helping athletes and coaches across 50+ sports efficiently plan and track workouts.
Brief results of the collaboration:
- The customer delivered a fully operational mobile version of its system, targeting tens of thousands professional athletes in Norway and contributing to their success.
- With customized XML parsers, adding new types of sports takes hours instead of weeks, helping the company digitize training diaries for a larger number of athletes’ activities and do this faster.
- The app helped the company to partner with sports clubs more easily, providing functionality needed for group workouts.
- Integration with wearables saved athletes and coaches time—due to automated synchronization of workout data.
- A scalable, secure, and compliant app enabled the company to offer their service globally.
The customer
Founded by sports professionals residing in Norway, the customer provides software tools for athletes, including olympiad-winning ones. The company’s major application is a digital training diary enabling athletes to align sports activities with specific goals—by connecting with coaches and ensuring workouts monitoring and analysis.
The need
Successfully serving the Norwegian market for almost 20+ years across 30+ types of sports, the customer rebuilt and enhanced its system, aiming to enter new regions and niches. Lacking in-house engineering resources, the company struggled with the prototype of the mobile part, expecting the app to scale and facilitate 50+ types of sports.
Seeking a development partner with a proven track record of relevant projects, the customer turned to Altoros for mobile expertise and assistance.
The challenges
The team had to address the following issues:
- Different types of sports have their own peculiarities influencing the way workouts are held. The app’s engine needed to be flexible enough to provide easy customization with minimum human intervention involved.
- The issue was complicated by the 10-year-old architecture artifacts of the web system, providing data structures via rigid XML files across all the 30+ types of sports.
- Dealing with personal athletes’ information, the app needed to be highly secure, complying with GDPR and Norwegian Personal Data Act.
The solution
Stage 1. To properly analyze the requirements and ensure knowledge transfer, Altoros worked closely with the customer during a preliminary discovery phase. Within 2 weeks, our business analysts helped the company to sharp project vision, non-/functional requirements, and acceptance criteria. Besides these documents, Altoros delivered a technical solution overview, UI mockups, a detailed estimate, a delivery plan, and a list of suggestions. The team also assisted with choosing between native and cross-platform development, evaluating the pros/cons of both.
Stage 2. After that, mobile engineers at Altoros built the diary functionality enabling athletes to set yearly/weekly goals and track workouts. To simplify the process, the team delivered templates for 50+ sports, creating custom XML parsers. The MVVM architectural pattern helped to minimize dependencies between the UI and the back end.
Stage 3. The developers ensured proper visibility of dashboards, goals, notes, etc., among athletes and coaches—while protecting personal data.
Stage 4. Utilizing APIs of the web part, the team integrated the mobile app with smart watches (Garmin/Polar), automating readings retrieval.
Stage 5. The experts at Altoros then focused on a separate planner module, binding together athletes’ plans, workout loads, and actual results.
Stage 6. Finally, engineers covered the system with tests and provided ongoing support.
The outcome
By relying on Altoros, the customer accelerated development and delivered the mobile part of its system, targeting tens of thousands of athletes in Norway. The app helped the company to partner with sports clubs more easily, providing functionality needed for group workouts. Integration with wearables saved athletes and coaches time—due to automated synchronization of workout data. The privacy and security initiatives ensured the app complies with GDPR and Norwegian Personal Data Act. Eventually, the customer entered the global sports markets, while staying confident in the app’s scalability.
Technology stack
Platform
iOS, Android
Programming languages
Swift 5.9, Kotlin 1.9
Frameworks and tools
UIKit, Core Graphics, Foundation, Realm Swift, CocoaPods, Swift Package Manager, App Center Distribute, Koin DI, Navigation component, Retrofit, Firebase Cloud Messaging, Coroutines
Data stores
Realm, Room, SQLite
Contact us
Jan-Terje Nordlien
Daglig leder
jan-terje@altoros.no+47 21 92 93 00Altoros Norge AS
Org.nr.: 894 684 992
Tordenskiolds gate 2,
0160 Oslo