Cookie Dev, Zaporizhia (2026)

12/05/2020

На работу у компанію CookieDev на постійній основі потрібен Sales Manager. Наша компанія існує понад 5-ти років. Ми займаємося розробкою iOS, Andriod та Web проектів.

Вимоги:
- Вільна розмовна англійська мова
- Грамотна письмова англійська мова
- Структурне мислення
- Вміння доносити думки як емоційно, так і послідовно
- Розглянемо кандидата без досвіду роботи
- Є улюбленні мобільні додатки під iOS або Android
- Знайомий з продуктами Google Drive (або є бажання познайомитись=)
- Витримка та стресостійкість
- Бажання розвиватися у цьому напрямку

Обов'язки:
- Супроводження теплих лідів та перетворення їх у клієнтів, від презентації компанії до старта розробки, Deal-closer по попередньо встановленій базі контактів та домовленних зустрічей.
- Розвиток відносин з потенційними клієнтами на розробку.
- Другорядне: пошук та налагодження першого контакта з потенційними замовниками компанії (leads search).
- Дослідження перспективних та розвиваючихся ринків, як і конкретних компаній на цих ринках, для виявлення потенційних можливостей
- Формування попиту на мобільні додатки серед стартапів та established businesses

Ми пропонуемо:
- Цікаву роботу
- Хороші умови для праці
- Гарну заробітну плату
- Корпоративи за рахунок фірми
- Медичну страховку
- Гнучкий графік

Якщо вас зацікавила ця вакансія, надсилайте резюме на [email protected]

12/09/2019

5 cases when Stripe or Braintree are not the option for your mobile app

Over the past 6 years while creating mobile apps here in CookieDev, we have been working with a lot of different smaller merchant providers, as well as Stripe and Braintree. As a business owner, you may and should consider something else only in next cases, for everything else - it's only Stripe or Braintree.

1) Local law regulations are tough on international payments and you'll have to stick with a local merchant provider as it's easier to start the project (release early). This most likely will be a temporary solution, and you'll switch eventually.

2) You want to save a buck and contacted directly some merchant provider and got a personalized discount. That's also possible, you won't get that from big players, but it's a definitely possibly with smaller companies. For example, we've got better rates from Fondy (https://fondy.eu/) this way.

3) You need to accept some very specific payment method in your mobile app. Though Stripe and Braintree are constantly adding new features to the list, and on the day of this article was published, they have been accepting, for example, AliPay (Stripe) and Bitcoin (Braintree)

4) You need a solution for direct payments between your users, also referred to p2p (person to person) payments. This feature can be often found among some local merchant services provider. You can also have 2 merchant providers within a single mobile app: the first one for receiving money for example from the subscription (you can use Stripe/Braintree here); the second one - for p2p payments (some local provider). For example, this is the workaround we've used in our Rooky app (https://cookiedev.com/portfolio/rooky/). There were some questions from users, and we had to explain it, but in the end, it worked just good.

5) The industry you're up to has a high level of chargebacks. We'll talk about chargebacks in the next article (https://blog.cookiedev.com/paymentgateway).

The big picture is that you'll have to use one of two options for a merchant provider if your mobile app is aimed at a global market.

These two options are Stripe (https://stripe.com/) and Braintree (PayPal's company https://www.braintreepayments.com/), and we'll give a more detailed overview of both in our next article (https://blog.cookiedev.com/paymentgateway).

Read more articles about mobile apps best practices on the blog: https://blog.cookiedev.com/

05/09/2019

Is it the right time for me to build a mobile app?

The short answer is “you should hurry, as you’re almost late”. If you run an online business that is successful, being in 2019 and not having an app means that you are in an early stage of startup (and that’s on your list soon), or you miss out. In 2018 there were more than 205 billion of app downloads (a 15% increase from the year prior) and by 2020 they predict 258 billion of downloads, that's 25% growth compared to 2018 (source https://buildfire.com/app-statistics/).

To give some insights on how mobile app could help your particular business, we’ve gathered some great case studies from world-known companies, as well as stunning 2019 stats with predictions for the next years.

Offtopic
Except for mobile apps development services, our company also owns a beauty services marketplace project which has the full complex: both native apps, fully functional desktop and mobile versions. If we could give a piece of advice to ourselves back in 2015 when it all started, we’d strongly recommend to skip the web version at all and completely concentrate on mobiles only service, as today about 80% of our traffic is in apps, and the web traffic has a way worse retention. That could save us quite a lot of time and money which we’d better spend on apps marketing.

What kind of services need apps?
If you run b2b kind of business, you probably don’t really need an app as your customers are not the end clients and what you do is rather getting integrated into something bigger for the end-user, thus you can’t offer a standalone solution. Mobile apps are good for standalone services, which do just one thing (and do it well), so it will do that one thing even better.

On the other hand, a mobile app should be a stand-alone solution that does one thing and does it well.

How mobile app can help your business?

Better engagement
A better experience in their phone, a more convenient way to order from the phone
- Case study: “17% increase in visits to their mobile site, which generated 34% more bookings and 38% more mobile revenue” (source http://3doordigital.com/klm-mobile-app-campaign/)

Additional communication channel (like push notifications)
- “49% of consumers use mobile phones for shopping and 49% of website traffic comes from mobile devices” (source https://99firms.com/blog/mcommerce-statistics/)

More returning users, better retention
- Case study: Here is how ASOS got 58% of their customers to order from the app and raised their sales 32% (source https://www.glossy.co/the-move-to-mobile/how-asos-gets-50-percent-of-customers-to-buy-on-mobile)

More sales because it’s easy to pay with the app today
- Statistics: “39% of internet users worldwide prefer mobile payments” (source https://99firms.com/blog/mcommerce-statistics/)

Gather more information about your audience to better target and approach the audience
- Case study: After understanding their audience better, MakeMyTrip increased conversions by 25% and made a 20% better transaction rate (source https://blog.appvirality.com/case-study-leveraging-app-referral-boost-mobile-app-growth-makemytrips-mobile-app/

Additional channels where you can engage the audience (commercial in Stores)
- Case study: 10bis (one of the largest Israel’s takeout ordering websites) “managed to get 15,000 app installs and 70,000 app interactions between October 2015 and January 2016 alone. Their ongoing campaign manages to deliver thousands of new users every month. The best part is that these users engage with the app since they are highly relevant” (source: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/casestudies/2016/04/mobile_case_study_app_install_ads_help_10bis_boost_takeaway_service.php)

What should we expect to change in the upcoming years?

“Mcommerce sales will account for more than half of all e-commerce sales by 2021 and m-commerce sales from smartphones will see a growth of 31.5% in 2020 and generate nearly $270 billion, while, by 2022, that figure should go up to $432.24 billion.”
https://99firms.com/blog/mcommerce-statistics/

And lastly, here are some tasty case studies of mobile app launches which happen over the last years to confirm once again where it’s going:

- Dominos Pizza based orders shot up by more than 41% https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/business-35714501
Starbucks. “There were 6 million transactions worth $1.5 billion made weekly in the U.S. Mobile payments accounted for 15% of total transactions made in Starbucks-operated stores in the U.S.” https://www.mbaknol.com/management-information-systems/case-study-success-of-starbucks-mobile-payment-application/

- KFC. “The three-month-long campaign helped drive foot traffic by engaging customers who were nearby a KFC store. It also drove a click-through rate that was 40% above the industry benchmark.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZsVORnp0kI

- BNP Paribas Bank app launch cased tremendous attention from the press for the bank, which ultimately resulted in new customers. https://www.accengage.com/bnp-paribas-push-notifications-and-in-app-messages-case-study/

- Amazon mobile application launch increased their overall traffic by 9.88% for the global traffic right after release, that is four times more than before. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/case-study-amazons-app-store-optimization

Couple more numbers worth mentioning (source https://99firms.com/blog/mcommerce-statistics/)
- There are 5.1 billion unique mobile users.
- M-commerce sales will account for more than half of all sales by 2021.
- 8 out of 10 Americans are online shoppers. Half of them use a mobile device for shopping.
- 39% of internet users worldwide prefer mobile payments.

You should understand that commercial in the app or in-app purchases won’t really make you a billionaire, because 98% of app revenue worldwide comes from free apps (source https://buildfire.com/app-statistics/). Your monetization scheme should be unique enough for the users want to pay it seamlessly, and the number of users that can be reached via mobile app will make you the fortune. We’ve seen so many various monetization models for mobile apps, that if you feel like it should make the money, but if you don’t know how exactly - contact us https://calendly.com/cookiedev/30-min/, and we’ll find that unique gold for you.

28/08/2019

Which map SDK is the best option for a mobile app?

Google Maps, Apple Maps, OpenstreetMaps, Mapbox, Yandex.Maps or Baidu Maps

There are quite a few very strong competitors among mobile map SDK vendors and each one has it’s certain benefits. Despite the fact that they may seem to be doing the same thing, each map vendor managed to be doing something better than competitors and this is what I want to talk about today. When choosing the map for your mobile app, not just go with Google Maps, but take a bit of time to investigate, as most apps which have maps are basically map-based (map is the central thing for a mobile app) and thus directly impact the user experience.

Here I want to list some of the options we’ve used in our projects and talk about the benefits each vendor has, along with week points.

Google Maps https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/
It’s good for:
- Basic integration for Android. If you just need a simple map for Android mobile app. It will be the easiest and the fastest option out there.
- Best coverage and details on a map for global projects. Things have been stable here and despite the fact that all major map vendors are trying to compete, Google still has the best coverage worldwide (few exclusions, however, see below).
- Basic objects on a map. Until there is nothing fancy, Google Maps SDK will work for your app
- Basic in-app navigation with traffic conditions data. Since Google Maps app is widely used for navigation, they provide a rather reliable data, though if you want to build a service around custom traffic jams data or navigation - Mapbox is a better option (Waze is one amongst who use them, for example).
- Integration with Google Places to list details about businesses around. And it is true to say that almost every business will list itself there cause it’s commonplace for people to look for restaurants, shops, entertainment, etc.
You need to check competitors if:
- You need basic integration for iOS: Apple maps are easier to integrate on iOS.
- You’re aiming at the Russian market. Yandex is the definite leader there and has the most detailed maps SDKs for Russia.
- You’re aiming at the Chinese market. Similar to Yandex, BaiduMaps is a leader there (and in fact a clone of Google Maps).
- Offline maps. Google has been promising to give access to offline maps functionality for third party use (as they gave to Google Maps app), but it did not happen yet. Use Mapbox or OpenStreetMap instead
- Advanced and custom navigation. Mapbox is a way ahead of Google for that

Apple Maps https://developer.apple.com/maps/
It’s good for:
- basic integration for iOS apps. Being a native tool for iOS it’s also fast and easy to integrate into any iOS app.
You need to check competitors if:
- Sorry to admit Apple, but for everything else, there are better options.

OpenStreetMap https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Develop
It’s good for:
- Offline maps
- Custom map layers (tiles). If your service is about the map itself (like, for example, you a unique ocean map details based on coordinates), this is your option. You can either choose from existing options (like YandexMaps or Google for example), but still use the features of Openstreetmaps
You need to check competitors if:
- Basic integrations. It’s relatively complicated to work with Openstreetmaps, as it’s an open-source project and it may lack some docs, tools or explanations.

Mapbox https://www.mapbox.com/
It’s good for:
- Your app is for a logistics service and you need the flexibility to build custom routes. Mapbox has a lot of options, as well as constantly improve.
- Custom objects on maps. It’s way easier to place any kind of objects on the map as custom markers. Other maps also allow that, but Mabpox gives a lot of flexibility and options for apps that heavily use objects on maps.
- Offline maps. This adds benefits to navigate offline which could be handy for routes outside of cities
- Augmented reality-based on Maps. Yeap, they offer a lot of tools for that already (while Google Maps is just promising them) and the sky is the limit.
- You want your project to stand out. There are so many apps which are using Google Maps that users are already getting tired of that. Mapbox will make your project look different, to the extent that Mapbox will make your app look more professional.
- The most developer-friendly. There is a common joke among Android developers that Google dev documentation is often ambiguous and unclear. Compared to it, Mapbox has done a great job. Their documentation is comprehensive and clear, with lots of usage examples in the form of sample apps.
You need to check competitors if:
- Details on map. Though Mapbox offers quite good details for the US and most EU countries (which will be enough for most of the projects), such giant as Google Maps wins this battle.

Yandex.Maps https://tech.yandex.com/maps/mapkit/
It’s good for:
- Is a definite leader for Russia and projects on the Russian market since it has the best coverage there. On the other hand, Google maps are also quite popular even on this market and may be more convenient for your app.
You need to check competitors if:
- For global projects, it’s Google Maps and Baidu for Chinese
- If you want to build custom polygons (draw something on map) or put various objects on a map, and you still need the map to be detailed in Russianinyou can use OpenStreetmMaps with YandexMaps maps layer on it. YandexMaps promises to add these features in the future, so it’s better to double-check if it has been already released.
- If you care that your data is been shared with FSB and other Russian governmental agencies. That’s exactly as it sounds, any of your data will be open to the Russian government by default. If you care about privacy, Mapbox would be a way more reliable option (there are still some open questions to Google in terms of privacy).

BaiduMaps http://api.map.baidu.com/lbsapi/
It’s good for:
- Is a definite leader for China and projects on the Chinese market.
- It basically the only option for the Chinese market, as no other maps vendor have valid and accurate location data in China. Their government has intentionally been banning other map services to get details due to security reasons.
You need to check competitors if:
- You’re looking for your mobile app to show good details on the map outside of China.
- Any complex map-based projects. BaiduMaps is basically a clone of GoogleMaps (similarities are noticed even on the login page, being unique is definitely not a priority for Baidu), but they are always a couple of steps behind.
- Same as with YandexMaps, don’t expect privacy here. All your data is open for Chinese government by default and they will decide what to do with it.
- Chinese knowledge is needed because they don’t even provide English documentation... Of course, you'll find some workarounds and examples on non-official websites but it won’t be easy or fast if the developer hasn’t gotten any experience with it yet.

This is just an overview of the main features to help you start looking into details of each option. Feel free to RESERVE A CALL https://calendly.com/cookiedev/30-min/ with me so I could share more use cases for each of the options for the map in a mobile app and help you choose the best one for your project! A lot of things are left unsaid and I'll be glad to share them with anyone asking!

Read more articles about mobile apps best practices on the blog: https://blog.cookiedev.com/

22/08/2019

Building a referral system for mobile app using Branch.io and your own backend

It’s always fun and engaging to build a referral system for a mobile app project, but as it also implies great responsibility, we have to consider each step or sub-function very carefully. One wrong movement or skipped use-case, and our users will start to rip you off instead of helping you to expand to new markets (How Uber Used Referrals To Help Expand Into 50+ Countries https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/uber-referral-program/) or have 3,900% increase in new users (Dropbox grew 3900% with a simple referral program https://viral-loops.com/blog/dropbox-grew-3900-simple-referral-program/)

Off top:
When considering building a referral system, just count how much you spend on marketing to get a user out of the street to do what your mobile referral system is aimed at (e.g. download app + register + fill profile + buy a subscription plan). That’s the amount you can give out as referral credits without any concerns. The goal of any referral program is getting for you users, cheaper than marketing spends, and that’s usually a higher amount for mobile apps.

There are a couple of strategies to build a referral system for mobile app based on events you want to track
- For non-monetary events which happen for non-authorized users (like app installs or first app launch)
- For monetary events which happen for the authorized user (like you credit user after his referred user ordered something)

For non-monetary ref systems, there is a higher risk of fraud, as they are not connected to a user being authorized, thus there are fewer indicators you have to take into account to make sure events are coming from a unique user. For this case, we can rely on various direct or indirect indicators that this mobile device is unique and grand credits:
- iOS. Apple doesn’t give us actual access to any unique device ID (UDID is not reliable enough as it can be faked or there is no access to IMEI from the apps) from the app directly, but we can generate some unique ID based on UDID and “first open” Unix time and store it into the keychain. The cool thing about this keychain is that if a user deletes the app, and then installs it for the second time, we can check the keychain for a previously stored ID to confirm that this device was enrolled with a referral program. If there is no ID - we generate a new one, if there is - we take existing one for the referral program-related events. Quite easy and elegant.
- Android. Here everything is more complicated as the user has a lot of freedom and can actually wipe the device’s operating system to change any possible device ID, including IMEI. We’ve spent quite a lot of time investigating what could be used for the same purpose of identifying the unique ID and stopped on using Secure.ANDROID_ID as part of secure settings (a combination of app-signing key, user, and device https://developer.android.com/reference/android/provider/Settings.Secure.html )

Branch says they can handle device’s uniqueness, but our QA department was able to bypass that after about 20 minutes of tests. Branch https://branch.io/ is still good and has very important features that we’ll use, but don’t believe all that they say.

For monetary events, you have much more things you can check, like confirm a phone number with SMS, validate email address, and some payment merchants like Stripe even allow getting a unique fingerprint of the used billing method (so you can grand referral credits based on used credit card itself along with other factors). Definitely, these monetary events or events after the user is properly authorized usually have a higher reward.

Next, I want to go through a user’s flow and connect each step along with what is happening behind the scenes (from the technical perspective) to illustrate all the settings it is necessary to implement for a mobile referral system to work:
- Unique Branch link is created for each user. It could be created either on the backend or directly from the mobile app itself after user logs in (manual here https://docs.branch.io/apps/deep-linking-api/);
- Brach link stores custom data to identify link owner (basically you can put there anything you want, like which app screen to open after install, but for the referral system will need just the user ID);
- And here is where the magic happens: User clicks the link, it opens in the browser, Branch makes a fingerprint of this device and a user is getting redirected to his store (AppStore, or Play Store, or any set link for other platforms or desktop);
- Users download the app as usual;
- Once they open the app for the first time, Branch checks its database for the same device (according to device fingerprint made when they clicked the link), install is recorded and Branch custom data is passed to the app (that’s the ID of the link owner);
- Next time users make the action related to referral credits, we pass link owners user ID, referred user device details (we’ve discussed how we can create unique device ids to distinguish devices) along with that user’s account details in our service and the request for the action itself to our backend;
- On the backend, we check if the referred user’s device is unique (not present in our database for previous referral communications related events), check that user’s account is unique (for example based on phone number verification mentioned earlier) and finally grant those commissions;
- It’s worth mentioning that if you have Firebase https://firebase.google.com as the backend (or don’t have the backend at all), it's also possible to organize everything there. In fact, we’ve built a ref system for another mobile project with Firebase (using Database https://firebase.google.com/docs/database and Functions https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions) and it turned out quite good;

There are so many ways referral program could be implemented in your mobile app, thus there is no some “general solution”. Here is a handy list of 77 referral program examples (https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/47-referral-programs/) where you can get inspiration for your business or feel free to RESERVE A CALL https://calendly.com/cookiedev/30-min/ with me and I’ll help you to apply all this to your mobile app referral program in no time.

Referral programs are not an easy thing, they should be constantly monitored and improved over time. You should treat each detail very seriously, as there are communities out there which are hunting different ref programs and their feebles (here is an article explaining how they hacked Uber referral program https://pando.com/2014/01/22/hacking-startup-referral-programs-for-fun-and-profit/). Luckily, referral programs in mobile apps give additional ways to protect owners and filter fraud, as a mobile device is still a highly personal thing.

The first thing that we suggest our clients when building a referral system for their app is to set up a section on the admin panel with top referral stats, and each month closely investigate top 10-20 of them because most of the fraud will be among the greedy ones and they will be on the top of the list.

Read more articles about mobile apps best practices on the blog: https://blog.cookiedev.com/

18/08/2019

Just added a new project to the portfolio!

https://cookiedev.com/portfolio/umiigo/ - Electric scooter rental app with sightseeing and leisure objects on map and Stripe payments integration

15/08/2019

What you need to know about starting a mobile application for electro scooter, bike, segway and carsharing rentals

While moving around crowded city centers is becoming more complicated and time-consuming, personal transport rentals become more and more popular. In the age of shared economy and green energy, apps for renting electric micro transport are becoming what you’ll use to get to work, family, stores, etc tomorrow.

We’ve built apps for electric scooter rental and bike rentals and gathered lots of experience in this field which we’d like to share today, as we believe that the future of transportation in cities is in this kind of apps (rather than Uber or Lyft).

The first thing that you need to know is that the most of the equipment out there that is used in such rental apps (including smart locks which could be placed on almost anything like regular old fashioned bikes or scooters) is build on open MQTT protocol. Except sharing apps, MQTT protocol is widely used in smart homes (IoT) as it’s much faster and reliable (confirms the request is delivered) than HTTP.
- First tip: if the equipment that you consider is not MQTT based - search for another one. Yes, there are options based on XML and HTTP transfer protocols our there (especially for car sharing, as that’s where they make things more complicated), but there are certain disadvantages with all of them (this question is worth a separate article, so feel free to contact if you want to know more technical details about the subject)

Okay, but what is MQTT used for? Shortly MQTT is used for communications between the device (tracking, unlocking, triggering features) and mobile apps backend server (through MQTT server). Each device has its own set of sensors, but for a rental kind of mobile app usually, you care about GPS tracker and mechanism to unlock and power on the device. They all are equipped with a SIM card slot, where you put Internet-ready card and go with a Bluetooth powered app which you use to set up the device to connect to your MQTT server. Then it sends all kind of data app needs to the server like battery charge level and it’s current GPS location. When the app needs to start the ride - it triggers your backend server and server sends a message to the scooter itself via MQTT protocol.

Despite the fact that there is a GPS module in the scooter itself, it is a good idea to have additional tracking for the user's device. Equipment is rather expensive, so an additional security level will only do good. For example, you can start tracking a user’s location right after he starts the ride and periodically sends to the server until he finishes it. In such cases, we often use quite an energy-efficient way to track location - we update the server only if the user’s location was changed for more than 50m, that is only when the user moves.

Additional security measure would be a built-in anti-theft system. Not all the devices go with it, but if you have concerns that your scooters or electro bikes are might be stolen - ask your vendor about it. That system is quite simple though reliable. When someone is trying to move the scooter in a turned-off state the lock will disable the motor by creating resistance to it. Along with that it will make a loud sound plus send an alarm to your MQTT server so you could take timely actions.

A lot of rental kind of apps put a QR code on their vehicles, why is that? A QR code is just a convenient way to unlock the vehicle and is not really connected to the equipment itself. Usually, there are two options: scan QR to unlock or enter the code manually. Right after there is an immediate pickup fee payment, and, as a result, the user gets the unlocked scooter or bike, or segway ready for the ride. Unlock codes as well as QR codes are created by the backend of the app and basically can be anything.

To give you an overall understanding of the pricing: regular scooter you can use for business will start from $450 (there are some which start from $58 on Alibaba, but they break faster that will pay themselves); smart locks with GPS are starting from $35; car-sharing solutions vary from $200 to $450 with a built-in display.

Another important part of rental mobile apps is a payment gateway or a payment processor. If you haven’t made your mind about one, here is another article we recently wrong about the subject: Best payment gateway for a mobile App (https://blog.cookiedev.com/paymentgateway)
In terms of rates, the regular business model has a pickup fee and by minute ride charge, along with some “minimum payment” (which is mostly required by payment processors, like Stripe has a minimum of 0.3 euro payment for any charge).

Lately, we’ve also seen projects which were built on top of transport sharing apps, like this one (https://umiigo.com/) combines hot places and sightseeing with electric scooter rental which resulted in a great business model. The sky is the limit, so there are a lot of options which could be built on top of rental apps and we’d be glad to hear what you have in mind, as well as to make it happen. RESERVE A CALL (https://calendly.com/cookiedev/30-min/) with our rep.

Read more articles about mobile apps best practices on the blog: https://blog.cookiedev.com/

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