Fantasy Golf League Mobile App
A UK-based startup launched an exciting fantasy golf application for golf fans to create virtual teams to participate in competitions based on real-life golf games.
Time:
February 2020
Platform:
Mobile
Team:
4-5 members
Industry:
Sports
A fantasy game application for golf enthusiasts with interactive league competitions and fantasy team management.
Project description
Pick10 is an iOS app for fantasy golf games and competitions — a platform for golf enthusiasts to create virtual teams consisting of real-life golf players. Based on the predictive nature of fantasy sports, users can compete with their friends’ fantasy teams in upcoming golf competitions. The app comes with features such as a variety of league competitions, integrated messaging, live scoring updates, and leaderboards that enhance the experience of fantasy game management.
Pick10’s uniquely designed and intuitive interface is in line with the top trends of the golf industry and the fantasy team management tools it provides are easy-to-use. Together they deliver the true fantasy game experience to users. The integrated in-app messaging feature that allows easy interaction, friendly banter and rivalry between users makes the app experience even more compelling.
About Client
Our client is a single-person startup based in the UK. After being dissatisfied with the responses they received from 11 other service providers, they realised that GoodCore was the only provider who understood exactly what the project requirements were. Thus began their journey to bring to life this passion project.
Problem
Our client was looking for a platform for fantasy game management that could be scaled up and adopted for sports other than golf in the future. This was a key requirement that GoodCore had to consider at every step of the development process. Some other important considerations for the app are the real-time nature of the game. For optimal experience, we had to build the app to be synchronised continually with the score of real-world tournaments so they are updated on the app in real-time along with the individual golfers’ score, league ranking and team positions that are calculated based on the score. The app also needed a golfers’ database on the backend that could be maintained and updated manually (i.e. uploading spreadsheets) as well as automatically through third-party APIs.
Our client also wanted an in-app purchase system to be implemented so that users can pay to create private golf leagues. This feature needed to be fully secure and with the ability to support multi-currency purchases by users.
Solution
Our mobile app development team brought the client’s vision to life by building a full-functionality application from scratch. The app offers a range of exciting features for fantasy golf management such as private and world league competitions, hole by hole live score updates, leaderboard, group messaging, and in-app purchases. In terms of design and functionality, we developed an app that appeals to golf enthusiasts and also is adopted for other fantasy sports with minimum modification.
For the backend of the fantasy game application, we developed an easy to use admin panel to allow Pick10 admins to easily monitor and control three important aspects of fantasy golf: Games and Tournaments, Golfers, and Pick10 Players. The admin panel offers a complete set of tools to control and manage the game details, golfers’ data, and status and score for each game and tournament.
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User Registration
We built the Pick10 app with easy and secure user registration functionality using Twilio. Users can sign up using their email and mobile number. The two-step verification mechanism makes the registration process secure.
World League
All players that enter a team into a game automatically enter into the World League for that game. The World League for each real-life golf game ranks all the fantasy teams for that game from best to worst. The rankings for the teams on the global leaderboard are updated as the game score and player positions are updated.
Private League Creation and Invitation
Users can create private leagues for games and tournaments by way of in-app purchases. Unlike the World League, Private Leagues are exclusive and only the users invited to them by the administrator can participate in them. The app generates a unique reference and invitation link for each private league. The administrator can invite other users through their phone contacts, WhatsApp, and email.
Integrated Messaging
The in-app chat messaging feature is exclusively for the participants of private leagues and is available as soon as a user joins a private league. Using the Firebase RealTime Database, we developed the group messaging feature that enables private league participants to interact with other league members. Users receive push notifications for every chat update.
Real-Time Score Updates
Built with robust processing capabilities, the Pick10 app uses the Enetpulse Sports Data API to update scores across all different score categories in real-time. With every game score, the hole by hole score is recalculated and updated on the app and simultaneously reflected in the golfers’ ranking, team score, and league positions.
Golfers Database
A golfers database in the backend stores all the profiles of golfers that users can choose from when creating their fantasy team. It stores the basic information about each player and their scores and statistics which are calculated and updated after every game.
In-App Purchases
The app has a secure and easy payment feature built in to enable users to pay for private league competitions through the payment channel on the App Store.
Personalised Dashboard
The app UI shows all the games with ‘open’ status that the user has joined. As the games reach their completion date, they are ‘closed’ and moved from the user’s personal screen. Each open game on the user screen also displays the status of selection; users can make and save changes for games that are open for the selection of players.
Our process
Our process of building the fantasy golf application followed an agile model of development. We initiated the mobile app development process by working closely with the client to understand their requirements for the app, the logic, and the technical complexities behind fantasy games. We finalised the visual design of the game application with the wireframes detailing most of the required features and proceeded with the development work after extensively discussing the backend and frontend specifications of the app that our client had in mind.
We developed a highly intuitive frontend and a robust backend with extensive tools for the admins to manage and monitor all aspects of the application using Yii 2 Framework (PHP), JQuery, Ajax, Twilio, and CoreData. We used Google Firebase RealTime Database for the in-app messaging feature and integrated the Enetpulse Sports Data API for live score updates. The app is also built with push notification functionality to notify users of every update. Before the product was launched on the app store, it underwent a rigorous testing process with hundreds of test cases to ensure quality performance.
Team
Our mobile app development team, consisting of business analysts, project managers, backend developers, frontend developers, and quality assurance engineers, worked exclusively with our client throughout the project duration. The team’s ability to understand complex requirements and their commitment to delivering helped us build a system that successfully met our client’s requirements and quality standards.
Technologies
Yii 2 PHP Framework
jQuery
JavaScript
XML
CoreData
Google Firebase
Client’s Feedback
