The Be United in Christ Outreach Ministry (BUIC) is a Bible-based ministry whose mission is to teach and promote Christian unity in accordance with God’s Word. This exciting new ministry was created by more than fifty individuals across ten states, united by a desire to see God’s will for Christian unity realized in the church today. With a library of 37 Bible-based resources, BUIC offers something for every believer.
Impacting the world with Christian Unity.
BUIC wanted a reliable and functional mobile app built in order to create an effective digital publishing platform that interacted seamlessly with their website. They also wanted to provide a consistent experience for users, but also wanted to maintain some of their site’s native functionality. They selected a technology vendor and began working on the app, but as the project progressed, they realized that their vendor was not capable of delivering the quality app they’d hoped for. LuminFire was selected to step in and take over the project, and was able to deliver custom Apple iOS and Google Android apps that allowed for the mobile experience to interact with BUIC’s storefront, as well as interact with their store content.
LuminFire improved the existing tech stack when they rebuilt the mobile app, choosing to use a cross-platform stack that relied on the Ionic Framework with React.js. This allowed the mobile app development on the two platforms (iOS and Android) to come from a single, consistent codebase. A valuable added benefit of this codebase unification is that the necessary ongoing maintenance of the app becomes greatly simplified, which will save BUIC money year after year.
Communication between the native app and the WordPress website was achieved using a robust GraphQL based API. Within the native app, LuminFire utilized the Apollo client to facilitate retrieving content and user-specific data from the website, as well as provide authentication to download content from the content repository.
The app has several key features:
- An overview / introduction to the ministry for mobile users through an app experience rather than web.
- A built-in ebook reader for ePub versions of the user’s purchased products.
- An audiobook player that allows the user to listen to their purchased products.
- Users have the ability to read news updates.
- Content within the app can be managed easily by users via the WordPress website.
The app is now available for download in the iOS and Android stores.
Working with LuminFire has been a tremendous experience from start to finish. They understood our vision and goals and worked hard cooperatively to achieve them. In the end, we have a beautiful app and website. The team at LuminFire has helped us to truly communicate the quality of our resources and make them easily available to a larger digital audience. I highly recommend working with LuminFire. – Andrew Mackay, VP of Operations, Be United in Christ Outreach Ministry
If you’re looking to build a custom app of any kind, LuminFire can help.
Tim Cimbura – CEO and Software Engineer
Tim is an expert in creating custom business solutions that make businesses more effective, productive, and profitable. He specializes in rapid application development with the Claris platform including FileMaker and WordPress. He also knows Apple macOS technology inside and out.