As technology is rapidly changing, it’s vital for businesses such as Epix to keep up. Epix has watched many trends come and go, and is constantly working behind the scenes to stay ahead of the game.
When google announced Kotlin as its preferred language for Android developers in 2019, Epix jumped on board. Preferring a hands on approach, we aimed to write a sample application, using Kotlin We wanted to test how real the advertised benefits were. We also wanted to know what the hype was about.
We formulated a plan to write a mini application that used all the latest and considered to be ‘better’ approaches, to do this. If developing the application turns out well, we will slowly incorporate what we’ve learnt, into our current mobile application.
After a crash course in Kotlin, we started work on a new skeleton application. Our first test was to see how easy it would to implement Android Notifications. Those annoying little messages that pop-up, outside your application all the time, making you click on them, or swipe them away.
Researching the problem lead us to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) a replacement for Google Cloud Messaging. FCM allows app developers to send notifications and messages to users across a variety of platforms, including Android, iOS and web applications. Embraced with the knowledge of FCM, we began to add it to our skeleton application. It turned out to be much less painful than we thought and within no time we’d successfully sent messages to a mobile device from a Kotlin server.
At some point in the future, Epix hopes to add a similar feature to our current mobile application, to satisfy various requests we’ve received from our customers, to continue moving the application forward, but most of all because we find it fun.
