Reality matters

It’s been almost a year since we introduced App Templates in Estimote Cloud. Every week, developers from the Estimote Community use them to generate hundreds of apps. It’s the fastest way to learn the beacon basics: sending notifications, changing content based on the nearest beacon, and more.

Today, we’re taking it a step further by expanding App Templates into entire use cases, such as a seamless loyalty-program experience. Just click a button, and you get a high-quality app ready to tweak, show around, and put into production. You save time, money, and leverage our expertise with simply one download!

Building great apps is hard

We launched the original App Templates to improve the onboarding experience in beacon technology. Rather than a long list of features, how about a catalog of small demo apps to experience the possibilities first-hand? And how about giving you the code behind those apps? You can likely re-use it in your own project, after all.

But building context-enabled apps is difficult on many fronts! While our current templates make it easier to get started with the basics, there’s so much more to learn. Which use cases benefit the most from added real-world context? How do you design a great user experience? How do you address common privacy and Bluetooth battery usage concerns among end-users?

Sharing our know-how

At Estimote, we live and breathe contextual computing. We were the first to ship beacons. We’ve worked with both startups and huge enterprises, across many industries. In the process, we’ve gathered a heap of knowledge and experience. So we asked ourselves, how can we best share it with our customers and help them succeed?

A 500-page book on the theory of developing beacon apps? Uh, no…

How about we condense our know-how into something more practical for app designers and developers: ready-made apps!

We’re kicking it off with our vision of a perfect loyalty-program experience, bringing you the Loyalty app template.

New app template: Loyalty

The Loyalty template is actually two apps: an iPhone app for consumers, and an iPad app for cashiers. Under the hood, the apps work together with Estimote Beacons to create a magical experience.

Imagine the next time you order a coffee, walking up to a beacon-ified cash register. The cashier sees you appear on the iPad screen, and awards you points for your purchase. All this happens without having to pull out your phone, let alone a loyalty card or having to scan a QR code.

It doesn’t get more seamless than that!

Want to redeem your points for free coffee? The cashier deducts points from your account on the iPad, and you get that hot cup of happiness for free. ☕️

We crafted the template with a beautiful design, high-quality code, and best practices. For the backend, our template integrates Firebase, so you don’t need to run your own servers.

Impressive prototypes that don’t break the bank

The expanded app templates are a great asset to help you win app-development contracts, or secure a budget for a new project. What better way to impress prospective clients or company stakeholders, than pitching with a fully-functional app!

Of course, you can’t afford spending weeks to build out a prototype before you secure the return on your investment. Time is money, and when it comes to building mobile apps, we’re talking about thousands of dollars.

With the new app templates, your prototype is just a few clicks in Estimote Cloud away.

You’ll get source code you can customize to your needs, and a short instruction on how to set everything up—which shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes.

More templates coming soon

The Loyalty template is our first, but it’s not our last. Our know-how goes well beyond just loyalty program use cases, and we’re already working on more templates. Any specific app on your mind that you think we should be adding next? Let us know!