Building a React Native Mobile Application For The World’s Most Advanced Water Heater

Client: Heatworks

Heatworks is changing the way the world heats water with their IoT tankless water heaters.

The Challenge

Aid Heatworks users in understanding their water heater usage by developing an intuitive means to control their Heatworks device.

The Solution

A React Native mobile application for iOS & Android that presents data from Heatworks devices and allows users to control remotely.

The Crew:

• Logan Edwards – A former mechanical engineer and current Senior Software Engineer with a passion for exploring the intersection between hardware and software
• Paul Cowgill – Former CTO at a YCombinator-backed IoT startup and Senior Software Engineer
• Jordan Cardwell – Senior full stack engineer with a primary focus on modern Javascript technologies

About Heatworks

For the last 100 years, electric water heaters have been designed with one fundamental flaw: they all use metal heating elements to heat water. Repeatedly heating a metal rod in water for consecutive years causes issues for both your heater and the water used within your household.

Heatworks water heaters use graphite electrodes in place of traditional metal heating elements. Nothing in their units gets hotter than the water itself, resulting in zero scaling and corrosion over time.  Similar to a Nest device, a Heatworks water heater can be connected to via Bluetooth connection or Wifi connection. This allows other clients, such as a mobile device or computer, to pull data from the water heater via an API over the cloud.

The Challenge

Knowing that multiple Fount Team Members have extensive experience in the IoT space, The Heatworks Team approached Fount to collaborate on the development of both iOS & Android applications which act as the user interface for the Model 3 Tankless Water Heater.

Translating the sleek industrial design of the Model 3 along with an intuitive, physical interface, the mobile app implementations are tasked with ensuring continuity between the physical user experience and the digital. The user interface modern and intuitive.

It was critical to Heatworks that the mobile applications provide a consistent experience to users across both iOS & Android devices. To provide a performant, cross-platform experience within the project parameters, we decided to use React Native as the primary development framework which allowed us to build the iOS & Android applications from a single code base.

While the senior engineers on the project crew were well versed in React, this project was one of our early React Native projects. It’s safe to say that we are now huge fans of React Native for mobile development. Leveraging our existing knowledge of web development & React, we were able to iterate quickly based on feedback from The Heatworks Team and beta users.

The Fount Team was also tasked with integrating various infrastructure and data providers, from Xively to AWS, as well as building the primary API for handling communication between The Model 3 water heater and the mobile applications.

The Result

Thanks to the collaboration with Heatworks’ talented team, Fount was able to deliver connected iOS & Android mobile application for The Model 3 Tankless Water Heater. The mobile applications allow users to easily onboard their water heater by signing up for a new account and connecting their device to a network. Once connected, users can control their connected water heater and monitor metrics on usage from their smartphones.

For more information on the Fount Team visit our homepage or explore our work and services.

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