Luxury Car Manufacturer Creates International Mobile Application

An international luxury car manufacturer building a strong reputation in South Korea needed help developing a next generation mobile application to remotely control their cars. The app enables drivers to monitor and manage their vehicle and make travel plans from outside their car. Since geolocation was a key feature of the application, and South Korea has restrictions on teams working with maps outside of the country, SPR coordinated teams across multiple countries and time zones by sending a technical lead/project manager to Seoul to oversee the effort in person.

Location and time zones were not the only challenges that made this project notable. The client had already decided that, rather than create the app using native languages for the iOS and Android markets, they would instead use Google’s new Flutter framework to create a hybrid app – something so new that no one on the development team had used it in the past. There were also language barriers that had to be overcome. And the Korean team lacked experience in methodologies like Agile that would be needed to complete the project efficiently.

SPR attacked the project with gusto. Even though the project was being carried out in a foreign country and SPR specializes in being a local, American company, the principal architect from Chicago spent nearly a year in Korea managing the effort. In addition to overseeing a team of Korean developers and members in Munich, Lisbon, China and elsewhere, the project lead also took the time to mentor the local team on technology and agile methodologies.

SPR successfully used a completely new tech stack, Flutter by Google; to complete a global application, working directly with Google at times to adapt the framework. Other technologies used were:

• Scrum using Atlassian Suite
• CI/CD using Jenkins
• Mesh using Consul/Vault/Terraform
• Azure cloud

The mobile application was successfully launched summer 2020 for use in Korea and many markets around the world, with a hybrid backend that will make future updates and modifications easier.