Golf Canada Mobile App (Social Features)

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With over 125,000 golfers using the Golf Canada Mobile App on a weekly basis, Golf Canada had a very successful app that was nonetheless severely limited in its ability to surface messaging and communicate with the userbase of the product. To provide a reason for Canadians to open and use the app outside of strictly recording their scores and increase engagement with their friends, Golf Canada and its partners, I proposed in 2022 that social network-style features be implemented in the next release of the Golf Canada Mobile App.

In late 2022 and early 2023, I architected and led the development of the friend system, home screen news feed, the ability to attach photos and videos to a score posting or content upload, and push / e-mail notifications about your friends’ activities in the Golf Canada Mobile App. The API and backend in use is Laravel, with Laravel Horizon utilized in particular as a fast, parallelized queue to create cached score and content posts that can be instantly retrieved and displayed in the home screen feed of golfers. To notify golfers about friend requests and the activities of their friends, Laravel Horizon queues and executes 1:1 transactional push notifications via OneSignal and e-mail via Mandrill. Finally, Voyager provides Golf Canada staff with a simple-to-use web backend to administer and moderate content on the platform.

Since release in August 2023 through the month of December, over 9.8 million posts have already been viewed via the home screen feed, 136,000+ new friend requests have been made and accepted, and over 30,000+ photos and videos have been uploaded via the mobile app. Critically for Golf Canada’s partners, a 400% increase in banner ad code loads and a 300% increase in ad impressions has resulted from the introduction of the home screen news feed to the app.