NAF Charge. Mobile App for EV drivers in Norway

An application for electric vehicle drivers in Norway featuring road planning based on the cars' battery capacities and distance from charging stations.

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Overview

The growing EV market in Scandinavia is leading to an increased awareness of the needs of EV users. Norway is considered one of the world's largest EV markets. However, 40 % of EV owners consider charging their cars a pain point.  To address this demand, one of Norway's largest non-profit organisations that cares about road users decided to fund an app. The solution is intended to make EV travel easier and more user-friendly. The long-term goal is to integrate with all operators in order to provide a single application that allows the car to be charged at any charging point.

About the client

Our client is a Norwegian member organization that works within the field of transport, mainly on topics such as traffic safety, the environmental impact of transport, accessibility, the need for better roads and infrastructure, tolls, and public transport. This non-profit organization offers roadside assistance throughout Europe, Turkey, and Israel.

Industry:

Non-profit Organization

Location:

Norway

The challenge

The mobile application is available to the client’s already registered users, without the need to create an additional account. The number of active users, combined with the client’s highly trusted brand, meant that the app had to be load-resistant and reliable. The main objective of the app was to integrate multiple charging operators to give users the ability to charge their vehicles at any charging station. The biggest challenge was the operators using different communication protocols and third-party platforms (for instance OCPI protocol, Hubject platform via OICP protocol, etc). All operations between the user’s device and the charging point are asynchronous and go over the Internet via many different systems. This added extra complexity to the solution and raised some difficulties, not only in terms of communication with the user but also in handling multiple exceptions and edge case scenarios. We managed to deal with it. Testing was crucial – due to numerous dependencies and scenarios, this was not an application that could be fully tested on a test environment, even with good coverage of unit and integration tests. Quality has always been our priority, so we conducted field tests (together with the customer), where we used real vehicles and real charging points in Norway to test the solution.

Used services

React Native, Expo, ASP.NET 6, Blazor, Microsoft Azure (AppServices, Functions, ServiceBus, SignalR, CosmosDB, KeyVault), Azure DevOps, Sentry, Postman, Jira, Confluence, Miro

Mobile App Development

Custom Software Development

The results and plans

01/

Integration with multiple charging operators to give users the ability to charge their vehicles at any charging station. We synchronised operations between users' devices and charging points. The final app is accessible and user-friendly. Consolidated with the client’s visual identity.

02/

This mobile application is currently in the early stages of production – it is available in AppStore and Google Play and includes features planned for an MVP (Minimum Valuable Product). However, this is just the beginning.

03/

We are about to start working on intelligent route planning dedicated to EV users

04/

We built a solution which is scalable and easily extendable. Our client trusts us and wants to develop the solution further with us.

05/

We are also planning to create Android Auto and Apple CarPlay versions of this app and continuously improve the UI and UX, as well as its reliability.

06/

There were a few obstacles along the way – not all third-party systems have complex documentation, and sometimes they work differently to what the documentation says

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