Not so long ago, a good friend of mine suggested that I could make a mobile application that could allow him, as well as other less experienced football scouts, to be able to collect and store analytical information on football players, to provide reports to clubs or agencies and also to communicate with more advanced scouts.
How can it be useful?
At the moment, there is no analogue to similar applications in the Russian segment. This is because there is no great need for it. Clubs don't want to spend money on it, and agencies don't have such resources. Moreover, the implementation takes too much time. And scouts are used to working according to their own schemes and storing information in notebooks and so on. However, it does not mean that such an application cannot be useful for young scouts. It would teach you how to make reports correctly, focus on the data that football clubs and agencies are interested in, and would also allow you to select those scouts who would have potential.
By that time, I had already worked enough in mobile development to make such an application. However, the right approach for the implementation was required, in order to understand what this product should represent as a result, and also design.
By a lucky coincidence, the last question disappeared by itself because my friend's girlfriend was just finishing her design studies at Yekaterinburg University, so her graduation project became our design.
After the first sketches of start screens, I began implementing. Since I had experience of real work with only two architectures MVC and MVVM+coordinator, I have decided to choose the latter.
The first step was based on a simple task – to implement start screens, a screen for player creation (an editor), a list of all football players and a profile. Everything took about 1,5 weeks.
Over time, there was need for new features, for example, evaluation of a report by other users, an access system (an open/ closed report), folders sorting and a collective access, for example, for scouts from one club.
I am not talking about the nuances of creating an editing screen that drank my blood. But the enthusiasm did not subside and everything was slowly but surely realized.
Then came the next step, namely the choice of a platform where the created data could be stored, that would allow to share between users. We did not have a separate backup due to the lack of any budget that’s why the choice fell on Firebase. Of course, we worried a lot about whether Google would leave with all our "players", cutting off the oxygen to Russian developers. But, as I have said above, we did not have investors, therefore we chose Firebase at our own risk.
Then there was the first launch in test flight, and with it the search for the first bugs and their removal.
For example, one of the most interesting is the crash of the application while running on phones with iOS 14. For reasons I didn't understand the application was crashing only on this version of the system, while on others it was working without any problems.
Nevertheless, then there was the final step and the output of the application in the App Store. And here again, we had a problem: how to pay for the App Store. For a known reason, it was not possible to pay with a card. We tried using a system with the help of an MTS operator. I couldn't register my account, so I had to create a developer account for my friend. Therefore, he is listed in the developers and not your humble servant.
What conclusion can I draw based on the results of the work done? I realized that it is possible to make a product on my own with the right approach and the right team. Even if there wasn't much experience before, even with friends. The main thing is that everyone should do their own thing, and in case of any potential conflicts, always look for compromises.
In general, I am proud of what we have created and I hope that this application will benefit those who are close to the football theme from a professional point of view.
