Progress (NASDAQ:PRGS), the leading provider of application development and digital experience technologies, today announced that UGroupMedia, Inc. (UGM), creators of Portable North Pole™, a global family entertainment property that brings personalized Premium Santa video content alive with cutting-edge technology, is delivering the magic of Christmas to children worldwide with NativeScript®, the open source framework for building truly native mobile apps with Angular, Vue.js, TypeScript or JavaScript.

The Portable North Pole app enables users to create free magical personalized video messages from Santa Claus for loved ones, both big and small. Since first launching a decade ago, the app has expanded in complexity. It is available in four languages (English, French, Italian and Spanish) and offers more personalized capabilities, requiring a larger development effort, that was taxing on UGroupMedia’s existing resources. UGroupMedia and its partner nStudio opted to re-launch the app on NativeScript, the open source framework that is part of the Progress Kinvey high productivity platform. NativeScript enabled the development team to build a native cross-platform application for both iOS and Android from a single code base, using JavaScript.

“The last two-to-three weeks of the holiday season represent the major part of our traffic for the year, so it is vital that our app delivers at peak performance for parents looking to give a little extra magic to their children,” said Yves Desgagné, CTO, UGroupMedia. “With NativeScript, not only have we been able to maintain a 99.6% uptime, but the NativeScript team has worked very closely with us to ensure app performance during peak usage, which could hit more than 100,000 devices accessing the app at one time.”

Through the use of the NativeScript framework, the development team at UGroupMedia is able to update features, push fixes and ensure stability faster and more consistently than before, and its data-driven dynamic forms are all within one spot for easy access. In addition, since NativeScript is based on JavaScript and is the only native development framework to support Angular 2, both web and mobile developers can work on the app at any time, without issue, in an environment that both teams are comfortable with.

“We needed the ability to develop and maintain our app for iOS, Android, and Web, but with a small team, an efficient and reliable code-sharing solution was necessary,” said Richard Smith, Lead Application Developer - Mobile & Web, UGroupMedia. “With NativeScript, the shared xplat code-base allows developers with diverse backgrounds to contribute comfortably to all 3 platforms, while still being able to utilize their previous experience and specializations. It is a great environment to work in and enables us to deliver much more with our existing team.”

Since the latest release of Portable North Pole, UGroupMedia has seen an increase in its average ratings in the iTunes and Google Play stores (4.8 out of 5, on average). They’ve also been able to expand the offerings of the app with more custom video options, a mobile reaction recorder, and a multi-device scenario. The reaction recorder captures the reactions of loved ones as they view their personal message from Santa and enables easy sharing via social media. The multi-device scenario provides a personalized video message from Santa, with an integrated personalized call on a separate device at the same time.

“Portable North Pole is a strong example of an app that benefits from the scalability NativeScript has to offer,” said Dmitri Tcherevik, CTO, Progress. “It has enabled the app to support 250K visits a day and has provided much needed flexibility for the development team behind the app, to drive efficiency and innovation, giving UGroupMedia a competitive edge.”

Leveraging a web-based development framework and a rich collection of UI components, the Progress Kinvey platform enables the development of truly native apps across multiple platforms with NativeScript. The modern serverless backend that is also part of Progress Kinvey auto-scales to the highest levels, has the flexibility to support frequent changes and integrates easily into systems of record using a configuration-based, low-code approach. Progress Kinvey provides all of the benefits of high productivity with no sacrifice of developer control. To learn more about NativeScript, and the Kinvey platform, go to www.progress.com/kinvey.

For more information and to download Portable North Pole, go to iTunes or the Google Play Store.

About Progress

Progress (NASDAQ:PRGS) offers the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications. We enable customers and partners to deliver modern, high-impact digital experiences with a fraction of the effort, time and cost. Progress offers powerful tools for easily building adaptive user experiences across any type of device or touchpoint, award-winning machine learning that enables cognitive capabilities to be a part of any application, the flexibility of a serverless cloud to deploy modern apps, business rules, web content management, plus leading data connectivity technology. Over 1,700 independent software vendors, 100,000 enterprise customers, and two million developers rely on Progress to power their applications. Learn about Progress at www.progress.com or +1-800-477-6473.

Progress, Kinvey, and NativeScript are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation and/or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the US and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

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