Case Studies

Introduction

This case study describes the development of a BlackBerry and iPhone mobile banking application for a leading bank in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Scenario

Our client, a leading bank in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was looking for an experienced mobile development company to help it port its J2ME mobile banking application to the BlackBerry and iPhone platforms. The client's active J2ME application was deployed on all mobile devices supporting J2ME but native application for BlackBerry and iPhone would be needed as both of these platforms needed native applications.

Solution

Unique Computer Systems was contracted to port the application to BlackBerry and iPhone platforms. All three applications were required to use the same web service for retrieving and posting information to the core banking system. UCS took the approach of studying the J2ME application and modeling the BlackBerry and iPhone on this. As functionality would need to be maintained as per the J2ME application, a blueprint for the two new applications was created and prototypes were developed.

To accommodate the new BlackBerry OS 4.5, certain UI level changes were required to make the application more visually effective. Both UIs included both English and Arabic options. Certain issues rose from the difficulties related to right to left alignment for fields in iPhone. Through several reviews and rigorous testing, the applications were confirmed for market readiness before being deployed.