Ice Report App: The power of Crowdsourcing

Andrew Jenkins, engineer at Split Rock Software and DreamFactory Community member developed an app called Ice Report. He was looking for a prebuilt system to make information in a database easy to access and handle users in secure way and found DreamFactory. DreamFactory allowed him to build a basic user system with a minimal interface, as well as allow users to submit data for others to view in a quick and easy way.

“I’m a strong believer in “fast prototyping”. I implement small achievable concepts and build from there. So far,  have built two apps.”

Ice Report is an app for people who live in the northern climate where lakes freeze to the point that it is safe to walk on the ice and drill a hole for fishing. Andrew and his friends were always annoyed by how difficult it was to find data on ice conditions. Their only source of information was through searching on forums and facebook groups, so they decided to create an app and crowdsource ice data from other fisherman.

For Andrew, DreamFactory had all the features he was looking for that are often difficult such as, user handling and developing a secure user scheme. DreamFactory easily connected to his SQL databases in a close second, provided a secure user management layer, and a simple “service” based architecture.

They first created and released an early version of Ice Report last year mid way through the ice fishing season.

“Thanks to DreamFactory, we had a really function app that we could trial with users in a short period of time.”

The Ice Report Android app was developed on Windows (Java) and the iOS app was developed on a Mac Mini (Swift). The DreamFactory Scripts he used are Python, and they deployed DreamFactory from Bitnami on Google Cloud.

“In two months we managed to register about 1200 users. DreamFactory made Ice Report possible. Without the Bitnami image and open source SDKs, this app would not exist.”