Simple experience on the surface, complexity under the hood

Kodak Moments gives you the freedom of customisation when it comes to your items and gives you various options for getting it ready. An international network of kiosks, consisting of hundreds of thousands of machines enables instant printing, while a delivery service allows users to take care of printing from the comfort of their home. In the app, you will find an editor loaded with powerful image capabilities to make sure you can make the most of your photos. All this underlying complexity needs to stay under the hood to make printing moments that matter as simple and effortless as possible.

The right architecture enables smooth operation at scale

Kodak had great ambitions for Moments on Android and their team knew that if they wanted to bring their game to the next level they would need the right foundations. Photo printing is a competitive market and delivering a swift, rock-solid mobile application is essential to stay in the race.

After listening to their vision, it became clear that it is in their DNA to move quickly and react nimbly to market needs. As we sat down to plan the app’s architecture we had three goals:

1. provide maximum flexibility,
2. make it unbreakable,
3. but still lightweight.

To make the codebase future proof and as concise as possible we used the relatively new programming language, Kotlin, the emerging new champion of Android development.

The result is an application where the robust codebase enables quick updates without compromising stability, which has paramount importance considering the large number of market-specific customisations required. And when we say stability we mean it: the app has over 99.9% stability rate across all Android installations.

Even though the app has a robust native feature set we managed to keep the app size under ten megabytes – download time is critical for an e-commerce application that is often installed as a result of a contextual trigger.

Being unbreakable doesn’t just mean stability: serving over 1 million users and offering payment features necessitates adhering to the highest security standards.

M-commerce is all about those little design details

While our engineers implemented a swift and rock-solid application our design team worked with Kodak to bring the best possible user experience to Android. A data-driven approach ensures that our efforts are spent on the areas where we can optimise the funnel for more conversions. As the user base is huge and diverse, we have to create an interface that caters to distinct levels of technical skills and the need for photo editing. 

Besides the ongoing optimisation, the feature set of the app is constantly expanding and our experts help in making sure that these new experiences meet platform-specific expectations on Android.

The next frontier: Finding those perfect moments with Machine Learning

Kodak Moments is all about pushing the boundaries of technology in order to amaze customers. Building a photo book requires careful picking dozens of photos, often selecting them from hundreds of candidates. How might we help users speed this up and find the right pictures with the push of a button? This is exactly what the Moments Finder™ function does through clever usage of Machine Learning. It is capable of analysing hundreds of photos swiftly to select those which satisfy the carefully defined criteria – such as the right composition, well-positioned faces and shiny smiles. To bring the function to Android we used Firebase ML Kit to run all the calculations on the user’s device avoiding extensive data usage, long loading times and most importantly: privacy issues.