Live bidding in a first app, without overloading the backend

Auctim, from Aartselaar, is an international online auction house for industrial goods, vehicles and machinery, and for insolvency sales. It grew out of the auction business Christophe Moyersoen started in the 1980s.

The challenge

Auctim had no app yet, and asked impaktfull to build it. It needed one with real-time bidding, with a manual bid or a maximum bid, and thousands of lots to browse and search. Auctim already had a website, which Dashdot rebuilt from the ground up, and the app had to stay in line with it.

Our role

impaktfull took the lead on the mobile app in Flutter, for iOS and Android. We discussed the API specs with Auctim’s backend team and made sure the app stayed in line with the website. Auctim wanted extra capacity, so icapps joined with a senior developer and a project manager. impaktfull kept the lead.

A frontend that stays simple

The frontend had to be as simple as possible and still show the user all the information. Finding that balance is an exercise between backend, frontend and design.

The backend should not carry any unnecessary load, and the streaming layer is an important part of that. The Typesense queries had to be built the right way too: fast results, without a heavy load on the Auctim database.

Today

After the launch, impaktfull took over the full management of the app. It is very stable, has 6k installs on Android and 5.6k downloads on iOS, and has already received new features and changes.