IO Question: How long did it take to develop the app? #io2011

One of the many question that we didn't get to answer in our talk - Mobile web development: Zero to Hero - is "How long did it take to develop the app?". Luckily, we have an answer: The first commit of the project was on the 3rd of March, but that was mainly just a simple README file, the first commit of the server was 25th of March which is when we really started working on the code and began taking our ideas and basic concepts into a fully fledged solution

You might think that just over a months worth of work went into this (it was, in theory), but it is a little more complex than that. We developed 2 frameworks, LeviRoutes and FormfactorJS and allowed us to push a lot of the common logic into a single controller. Using FormfactorJS it was possible to assign engineers to each distinct UI and have them work on it in isolation. FormfactorJS was used to specialize the base controller that was in every single page. If you look in our "scripts" directory, you can see how we structured the project - controller.js is common across all interfaces, desktop/controller.js is then dynamically injected at run-time and using prototypal inheritance we added custom formfactor specific features (such as swipe detection in the case of tablet and mobile)

In total we had 4 engineers working on the project, each working on their own UI. Each engineer spent roughly 20% of their time developing the parts of the UI that they were responsible for.

In all, it took just over a month of man effort to develop this application.

View Source | Make a correction | Correction history

I lead the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google.

We want people to have the best experience possible on the web without having to install a native app or produce content in a walled garden.

Our team tries to make it easier for developers to build on the web by supporting every Chrome release, creating great content to support developers on web.dev, contributing to MDN, helping to improve browser compatibility, and some of the best developer tools like Lighthouse, Workbox, Squoosh to name just a few.

I love to learn about what you are building, and how I can help with Chrome or Web development in general, so if you want to chat with me directly, please feel free to book a consultation.

I'm trialing a newsletter, you can subscribe below (thank you!)

Book a consultation

See Also

Tags