Development of a prototype mobile app for parcel delivery

In preparation for a future integration of live navigation during the delivery of packages, the extent to which the “Mapviewer” platform selected for this purpose can be integrated into the existing Xamarin app was investigated. Since significant problems emerged during this analysis, a native prototype is consequently being developed for Android.

The prototype is based on the common concepts of “Modern Android Development (MAD)” using Kotlin, Gradle (Kotlin script), MVI and Jetpack Compose. The prototype includes a full connection to the Datawedge Intent API of the Zebra Technologies scanner platform as well as the map and navigation component “Mapviewer” for the display of delivery destinations and live navigation to the next planned delivery destination. A particular challenge here was the connection of the Activity- and Fragment-based Mapviewer components with the more modern Jetpack-Compose framework.

The prototype is designed according to the concept of Onion Architecture and uses a reactive design based on the MVI approach. Likewise, a largely declarative approach with code generation based on KSP during the build process is chosen in order to reduce boilerplate code.

Furthermore, the prototype contains unit tests and instrumentation tests for all included components as well as previews for Jetpack-Compose based UI components.

The prototype is the basis for a future redevelopment of the existing Xamarin app to improve performance and integrate new features.