Mobile app development Freelance

Freegle (www.ilovefreegle.org) is an UK online reuse charity. We help people give and get things, for free, locally by posting WANTED or OFFER adverts. We’ve been running in this form since 2009, and have 3.5 million members – but because giving things away for free isn’t exactly a profitable business model, we’re very low budget and run largely by volunteers with significant funds from donations which we wish to continue to get from users.

Our current mobile apps (on Play and App Store) for phones and tablets are a packaging of the website code using Cordova. The code is largely the same as the website, with some tweaks to make it work on mobile and some additional functionality such as notifications, deep links, rate app and version display.

The app is used for around a quarter of posts. We are not aggressively redirecting mobile users to the app (e.g. by preventing them using the site) but we do signpost it – so there’s scope for increasing its use.

We have some extra funding which we might want to use to revamp the app. Key goals:

• We want this to feel much more native, rather than (as currently) like a responsive website on a phone. It should make idiomatic use of native features (e.g. gestures, camera, notifications).

• We want it to feel simple. At the moment it feels a bit clunky, in ways we struggle to articulate and therefore fix.

We are asking for initial expressions of interest in doing this work. We don’t mind if you are a commercial firm or a one-person shop.