Greenlinks
GreenLinks mobile and tablet applications make the game of golf more engaging by bringing the full advantage of the course maps, hole-in-one, and birdie challenges with cash prizes.
Overview
Today there are approximately 25 million golfers in the US, so it’s no surprise that there are golf courses in all 50 states, and California and Florida lead the pack with more than 1,000 places to hit the links in each.
GreenLinks is a startup in this niche with a core idea of making the game of golf more engaging and exciting by bringing hole-in-one and birdie challenges and cash prizes.
The Challenge
GreenLinks was looking for a company with an unparalleled track record in mobile and tablet development and they contacted Mercury Development with their idea. The goal was to create a mobile app with detailed GPS maps of golf courses to facilitate enrolling for birdie or hole-in-one challenges with money prizes.
Unstable Internet Handling
The two main challenges faced by the Mercury team include handling the unstable Internet connection on golf courses and identifying the particular hole to switch to based on the user location while ignoring other holes on the same path.
Golf-Cart Equipment
GreenLinks were looking for tablet application development since there was an option to equip each golf-cart with a tablet running a specifically adjusted version of the mobile app, which would also require a back-office solution for the management.
Wide range of golf courses
GreenLinks were aiming to make the application usable at a wide range of golf courses including the ones with no cameras pre-installed for the game recording and further verification by the service admin, and, consequently, for the premiering.
Solution
Mercury Development suggested building the application with a cross-platform React Native framework which would cover both Android and iOS platforms and provide better user experience and considerable cost savings through a shared codebase.
Mobile Features
Free GPS — any course, any time.
Request a course to add GreenLinks challenges with a single tap.
Log into a golf cart with personal QR code in seconds.
GreenLinks wallet allows easy payments and payouts.
Internet Сonnection
In order to overcome the internet connection challenge and make sure that each golfer's user flow is smooth, Mercury decided to load and cache the major part of the application content during the initialization which minimizes the most data-heavy requests sensitive to the connection quality. Also, in the tablet apps, the Mercury team implemented a special feature that allows pre-setting the device for a specific course fully before players even get in the golf cart.
GPS Navigation
When working on custom course maps, GPS and laying out the logic for auto-switching between the holes based on the player’s moves around the field, the Mercury Development team came up with additional logic for calculating the distance between the holes and the user’s current location and identifying which holes the golfer has already played. Such a solution helped to make the course navigation smooth and user friendly.
See Also
Grant's
ORIGO
Mayday
