Postmark delivers transactional email for web applications. Every email sent through Postmark is tracked so that developers can log in to their account and check if an email was delivered or bounced. This gives them the power to debug email delivery and ensure their emails are reaching customers. Until recently, developers could only access this deliverability information through a web application.
It had been a goal of mine to learn iOS development for a while. In September of 2017 I started working through Apple’s App Development with Swift course and decided that building an iOS app for Postmark would be a great project to test my new skills.
Over the next few months I put together an initial prototype which I showed to a few people on the Postmark team. The feedback was positive, so when Wildbit announced that the first few weeks of 2018 would be designated as hack weeks, I already knew what my project would be.
My goal with the iOS app was not to replicate all the functionality of the Postmark web application. Instead I focussed on providing a toolkit for developers to troubleshoot email delivery while they are away from their computer. The iOS app would answer the question “what happened to that email?” while a developer is travelling on a train, or waiting at a bus stop.
I spent those first weeks in January improving the UI and adding features that would give developers as much insight into their email delivery as possible. At the end of the hack weeks I demoed the app again to the team, and started a private beta program to trial the app with a group of Postmark customers.
The app is an incredibly useful tool for our team to be able to solve email delivery issues on the go and provide prompt support to clients.
— Luke Pipe, Pipe Media
The beta program ran until May 2018 and enabled a flood of feature requests, bug reports, and general feedback.
The app launched on the App Store at the end of May 2018 and continues to receive great feedback from our customers.
This was the first iOS project where I was responsible for both design and development of a native app. It was an incredibly fun experience and I hope to tackle many similar projects in the future.
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