Xamarin Customer Showcase: PGS Software + Volotea

Jayme Singleton

Cross-platform, mobile applications are the way of the future, especially when it comes to travel. We sat down with Boguslaw Blonski from PGS Software, who explains how they took Volotea to new heights with Xamarin. As well as the inspiration behind the project and what the future holds.

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Volotea, a leading European airline offering competitively-priced direct flights, was looking to re-invent their mobile app. They headed to PGS Software to build a beautiful app with Xamarin and .NET. Volotea was not only looking to update their iOS application. They also needed cross-platform abilities to target Android providing an additional distribution channel. PGS Software delivered a stunning app leveraging Xamarin.Forms for the user interface. It is now used by over 1.2 million people and spanning seven languages! Developers at PGS Software shared their insight (below) on how the app came together.

The Volotea App

The Volotea app gives passengers an intuitively designed mobile app for both iOS and Android. It allows passengers to book flights and check flight statuses. It also gives access to mobile check-in, flight deals, and much more!

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Discuss the Technology Behind the Volotea App

“We were all in on Xamarin.Forms from the very start. We started using Xamarin.Forms 2.6 and have upgraded to every release along the way since then. What we have loved is how Xamarin.Forms continues to advance and add new controls. Since the time that we started building the app we have removed over 70% of our custom renderers as they were no longer needed.” – Boguslaw

There is also a lot of native functionality built into the application. So having the ability to bind third party libraries and leverage community NuGet packages was a time saver. PGS Software added beautiful animations with Lottie, Google Pay, and Apple wallet integration. Additionally, they included push notifications, credit card recognition, and even PayPal integration with ease.

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Favorite Part/s of Developing with .NET and Xamarin

The app required a unified design across devices that was also aligned with Volotea’ s branding and style guidelines. Xamarin.Forms really provided the perfect way to achieve that unified look with custom styling options.

The backend was also a very interesting part of final product. The entire technology stack was based on .NET, which meant the ability to use .NET and C# everywhere. It also meant using the same tool to easily consume over 60 backend endpoints and update them as the API changed.

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Beyond Building the App

One thing that was very important is continuous integration. As well as ensuring high quality code with unit testing. PGS Software easily switched over to use App Center to setup a CI pipeline for the app. In addition, they were able to completely customize steps along the way. As well as setup unit tests with code coverage and even StyleCop validation. This ensured that rapid iterations on the app kept best practices intact.

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Xamarin Customer Showcases

Thanks to Boguslaw Blonski from the PGS Software team for sharing details about their experience building this app with Xamarin. Find even more companies and developers using Xamarin to build world class mobile apps with .NET on the official Xamarin Customer Showcase site.

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