Sirius XM is one of the leading streaming media companies that serves entertainment on a premium subscription basis. Headquartered in the US, with an establishment of 11 good years and approximately 34.55 million subscribers, the company is known for its quality content and client retainment. The satellite radio company merged with Pandora and became the largest ad-supported audio entertainment streaming service in the US.
SiriusXM offers its subscribers with over 140 channels of ad-free music, talk shows, comedy, news, and much more. They can switch streaming content across multiple devices and speakers. Additionally, the radio dashboard comes installed in new vehicles from all the major automobile companies in the US. The organization’s idea is to provide an omnichannel experience with the best quality content and minimal distortions.
The streaming media company was in dire need of an app that catered to their business logic. In their earlier collaborations with vendors, they experienced inefficiency in timely delivery. The app they were using earlier was developed by a team that took longer than expected to deliver and couldn’t adapt to drastically changing consumer preferences.
Another major challenge was to have a uniformly correct code written for all of their platforms, like Android users, iOS, and Amazon Fire OS devices. The inability to find highly skilled developers that could integrate legacy code with the technology needed for building new mobile applications made SiriusXM suffer for a long time. A series of related challenges and more made the development team look for better outsourcing options or vendors in the market.
While tying up with Sirius XM, one of the first things we did was to research the company, absorb the then used mobile app, the technical issues related to it and then recommend how we can add value to the company. Unlike any other team offering a standardized way of working, we first dug into the core of the existing problems relating to streaming, which had never been identified before. Once we analyzed most of their problems, we gave them an idea of how we were going to move forward with their app development.
Interestingly, we built a robust connection with the team of Sirius XM and gave them exactly what they needed! Addressing their major technical glitches, including bugs, their universal coding language, and lack of innovation, we helped them with more straightforward code reviews, protocol-oriented programming, and cleaner code.
On technical grounds, we used MVVP architecture for Android applications and VIPER architecture for IOS applications. The different interface adaptors worked well as a wrapper around the business logic. The decision to use these interfaces was influenced by their ability to convert data from mobile apps (SWIFT for iOS and SWIG for Android) code to the format in which the business logic is written (C++ and Objective C).
Our experts were also able to transform the UI completely, in terms of both design and reusable components. The newly developed mobile application could now adapt to multiple networks, which means that it becomes easier for the user to return to their radio channel after switching devices, or when using a bad network signal. We used a data-driven approach to construct the User Interface using a reusable code that further helps in faster code development.
In five months, Copper Digital was able to launch a Beta version and a subsequent official launch within the next three months. Consecutively, the Sirius XM app garnered over 650k 5-star reviews on the Apple app store and was also on Top 10 music apps.
As of May 2020, the streaming media app has about 1.4 million iOS downloads, with an average of 4.8-star reviews. With excellent delivery and a more data-driven approach to solve problems, Copper Digital continues to be a preferred vendor for Sirius XM.
