988 app's live video streaming function with viewers' comments and reactions in real time

Crafting a modern, awesome, radio app with live video

We developed a brand new mobile experience for 988 from the ground up — including a live video component for radio, a first in the market.

988 is a leading Chinese-language radio station based in Malaysia. They are part of the Star Media Group, one of the best known and most enduring media names in Malaysia.

Project Brief

988 previously had a mobile app that was already in the market as of early-2019, but they wanted to take their user experience and user engagement to the next level.

They had an innovative idea for a digital radio station that mixed radio, catch-up play, live video, podcasts, fresh news content, and user rewards.

The project was ambitious and 988 needed a development partner who had not only the right skillset, but also flexibility in trying out new ideas, and determination to deliver the quality product that the brand deserved.

Perfecting the Details

988 came to us with great early designs and strong opinions about the direction of the product. Using their initial concepts as a springboard, and working closely with them, our design team used their experience to expand upon the design, determine and improve on usability issues, fill in gaps in functionality and user flows, and last but not least — repeatedly refine every part of the app until it felt great.

Building it Right

We built brand new native iOS and Android mobile apps from scratch for the project. The need for a complete, platform native experience and the significant use of streaming media — which requires low level customizations — made this a natural choice.

An app with a wide range of functionality like the 988 app is always a challenging endeavor.

Building an end-user-facing app in a competitive market for a demanding demographic involved staying as true to the design vision as possible, with minimal compromise.

Finally, we ensured that the app performed fast and butter smooth on any device using our optimization techniques.

FM

Streaming live audio from the studio in the full screen player

…and switching to live video with viewers' comments and reactions!

The CMS and Backend

Backing everything you see in the mobile app are a heavily customized content management system (CMS) and a suite of backend services.

Once again, the project presented a unique challenge as the content that needed to be managed was diverse in nature — the programming schedule, live video content, catch-up content, music charts, news topics, a video library, podcasts, ad management, and more.

We wanted to ensure the 988 content team had an easy-to-use system that was intuitive despite the volume of content being managed. We knew that the system could not diverge too much from their pre-existing workflow to ensure that their onboarding to the new system would be as painless as possible.

To that end, we embraced pragmatism. We implemented the CMS in close collaboration with the actual team that was going to use it — to ensure that the result aligned with how they expected it to work, and not necessarily how we thought it should work.

To cap it all, we developed a suite of backend services that integrated with the CMS and various third-party services to handle user profiles, comments, rewards, and more user-oriented features.

Building on AWS

AWS is the world's leading cloud platform; it offers secure and high performance computing, storage, networking, database, and a plethora of other services.

988 and the Star Media Group were already heavy users of AWS, which made it a natural fit for the diverse architectural requirements of the project. And as an AWS partner, it's also the cloud platform that the Snappymob team has strong competency and experience in.

Performance

High performance, on-demand elastic services, together with worldwide presence allow us to achieve our performance targets at the click of a button while remaining cost-effective.

Reliability

AWS's ease of configuration, focus, and track record when it comes to reliability facilitates worry-free operations. It allows us to concentrate on our application instead of the infrastructure.

Security

We rely on AWS's proven platform and team for infrastructure, host software, and managed services security. Instead, we dedicate our resources towards guest and application layer security.

Flexibility

The breadth of AWS's offerings covers the entirety of our architecture. It provides confidence that future needs will be easily accommodated without major rework.

Snappymob went the extra mile to ensure that the product needs were met, satisfying our exacting and demanding standards.
Sashidaran Subramaniam, Manager, Star Media Group