Mobile app development has been the fastest growing software development since the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the creation of the App Store in 2008. After the rise in popularity of the smartphone and mobile app development, businesses started to shift from browser-based software to mobile platforms. There are multiple reasons that any company would want to reach out in the mobile environment, including attracting new customers, creating a better experience, expanding their brand, being more accessible, and overall growth. Developers started to build new platforms that would make it easy for not only their own company but anyone else to develop new applications at a faster pace. Today there are three different ways to create a mobile application: a native app, a hybrid app, and a web app. At DriveTime, we spent time researching and developing possible options for how we could make a mobile application to expand our user involvement. Our conclusion was to use a hybrid application that would incorporate our already existing web app and relaunch it as a native app. I took over this project for DriveTime and planned to implement two new features for their mobile application. Using Apache Cordova, I dived into the Software Development Life Cycle to create and deploy a Rate and Review feature and Push Notification functionality. In the end, I was only able to implement the Rate and Review feature due to some unexpected delays in development. I assumed all roles of a standard Agile development team to understand all of the different aspects that go into planning, creating, and publishing software.

Gamification is the process of adding game mechanics to non game activities, thus creating a more engaging environment. Loyals provides a gamification API which can be consumed to add Loyals (achievements) to any website, application, or mobile app. Loyals are used in two major ways: (1) to create an interactive environment where users are rewarded for completing tasks and (2) as contextual information useful for analyzing user interaction with the application. The interactive environment inspires users to continue using an application while the contextual information can be used for improving the application to draw in new loyal visitors, ad targeting, creating user profiles, and much more.