In December 2019 FirstGroup and Trenitalia partnered to form Avanti West Coast and take on the Inter-City West Coast train line franchise from Virgin trains. As part of the franchise agreement, Avanti would provide users with a mobile app for journey planning and ticketing. To deliver this, a new variant of FirstGroup’s already successful multi-service-operator Rail app project would be rolled out with Avanti West Coast’s branding and connected to Trenitalia’s PICO data system for Railways – developed by IBM.

The primary challenge for phase one of this project (in addition to the UI branding updates) was to integrate the new variant with the new back end data system (PICO). All the pre-existing variants of the app used the same data system and API – provided by Worldline. A lot of effort was spent working with the mobile back end to create an API for the client mobile app that was as close as possible to the API used for other variants – to improve maintainability of the single code base.

Once the new app was functional, a second phase of work was undertaken to condense the ticket-purchase flow from 8 or 9 different screens/steps down into 3 or 4 steps – making for a better and much quicker end to end experience, and reduced abandonment rates.

I have been the core iOS developer on this project since the beginning and have designed the implementation approach for new features, lead the transition to a cleaner MVP architecture for new areas of the app, improved unit testing, and introduced ReactiveX for iOS.

The app‘s initial launch was in November 2020.