Arounja
A mobile application that lets users find community resources based on location
Community Connections of New York (CCNY) is a nonprofit management services organization that partners with community-based organizations, behavioral health agencies and government agencies to provide training, evaluation, quality improvement, utilization management and technological innovation to improve the lives of people in the communities that our clients serve.
Arounja is CCNY’s brainchild: A mobile app that helps users find community resources around where they live, work and play by type, location or through searches. Users can share new resources to the map, update resources that exist or share resources they find with others.
One codebase to rule them all
We built the Arounja app using Ionic Framework – an open source platform that allowed us to target multiple platforms with one codebase through HTML, CSS and JavaScript. While Android and iPhone users were the target audience, this approach meant that the application could also be used by other mobile devices as well as by desktop users. For ease of finding and downloading the app, we also built and deployed apps into the Apple app store and Google Play store.
One of the key features of the Arounja app is its licensing model. End users need an active license to use the app, with the plan that large organizations would then purchase licenses to provide to the people they serve. CCNY needed an easy way to manage and distribute the licenses as well as an easy way for the organizations to purchase them.
Platforms and technologies
WordPress, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WooCommerce, Angular, Ionic, ElasticSearch
Our ideas in action
- Utilize the WordPress REST API to create custom endpoints that return resources to the app.
- Use WordPress to contain thousands of resources in a fast and easy to manage system.
- Sync and store the database in Elastic Search, making the WordPress API much faster than normal.
- Create app in Ionic, allowing one set of code to work on desktop, mobile and app environments.
