Parrot AR.FreeFlight
Parrot specializes in technologies involving voice recognition and signal processing for embedded products and drones. AR.Drone is a quadcopter with cameras relaying flying experience in real time to a mobile device.
The challenge
Originally, Parrot offered to control their drones only with an iOS application developed in-house. The project was successful, so the company decided to launch an app for Android as well. The goal was to provide Android users with the same functionality and deliver app updates to them as soon as possible.
The application was supposed to include a cross-platform native library, so the company was looking for partners who could help them with Android NDK, which is very different from the more common Android SDK. Using the native library made the development process much more complicated and error-prone and, thus, required higher code quality.
Delivered value
Lemberg Solutions built and delivered the Android official application, which was deployed to Google Play. AR.Drone users have downloaded the app more than 1m times already.
The process
Lemberg Solutions was selected as the developer for this app because of our profound Android NDK experience.
Testing during development was the most interesting part of the process. Some features required a lot of physical space for testing, so we often had to get outdoors, test the feature (raising a few eyebrows) and go back ASAP to analyse the logs and ensure that everything worked as expected.
Parrot provided the AR.Drones for testing, and, at one point, we had a drone graveyard in the office as some of them broke down and as Parrot sent us new versions after AR.Drone device new releases.
How it works
We have been working with Lemberg Solutions for a couple of years now. Their team has always been able to provide a very efficient service with a high level of expertise and meeting of deadlines. I particularly appreciate the flexibility offered by the team and the ability to propose solutions or workarounds for every technical issue.
