Overview
Around 2010 and 2011, IDC Projects was contracted to build the first native iOS and Android prototypes for a church and community engagement platform then operating as Aireal Mobile, later Aware3. I was the project manager: I guided a two-person team of developers who wrote the apps, and I managed budget, people, and technical oversight. The engineering was theirs. The scope, sequencing, and the judgment about what was good enough to show were mine.
The structural idea is what makes this entry worth keeping. The client’s side supplied a SOAP specification, and the apps were built to bootstrap their content and configuration from that web CMS rather than shipping it in the binary. One app codebase per platform, content and branding served over the wire, and a new organization’s app produced by changing what the CMS returns. That is the headless-CMS-plus-native-frontend pattern, arrived at in 2010 out of necessity — the alternative was hand-building a separate app per customer — and years before the pattern had a name or a category of vendors selling it.
The build itself was Java on Android and Objective-C with Xcode on iOS, with Git for version control, covering the features a community organization actually needed: calendar, chat, maps, and question-and-answer. In 2010 none of those were library calls. Native mobile was new enough that the working assumption of every estimate was that some part of it had not been done before, which is the specific management problem of prototype work: you are sequencing around unknowns rather than tracking against a plan.
The prototypes seeded the company’s product line. What was proven in a prototype became the platform the business was later built on, which is the honest version of the outcome — this work established that the model worked, and other people carried it from there. Aireal Mobile’s read of the market was right, and the decade that followed proved it: the platform grew to serve more than 1,000 organizations, and the company built on it was later acquired.
There is a longer arc. I returned to the same company nearly a decade later, when the fleet had grown past 1,000 customized apps and build capacity had become the constraint: Aware3 Impact — DevOps Transformation.