Architecture and development tips for a successful photo booth app

Think twice; build once! It's the foremost advice we give to any entrepreneur who is thinking of revolutionizing the classic photo booth into a new entertainment experience. 
The final user sees just the surface of the product. Underneath the simple act of taking a picture with a simple touch on a screen lays a whole complex mechanism. The app developers must follow a set of key rules that will cover the issues that might appear due to the specific type of this software. 

These are the four tips on how to build a photo booth app: 

App Architecture

Scalability is a top priority when building any product that is dealing with a large user base or adding new features over time. There's one way to make sure that a photo booth app is ready for the moment when the project will hit a significant size. Needless to say, the app architecture should be correctly implemented from the very beginning. 
The MVC pattern (Model-View-Controller Pattern) was the most popular approach in terms of separate application’s concerns for a long time amongst iOS apps. It's still a good choice for small projects. Yet, for better scalability (because people always want to add more features later on), we'd recommend looking into MVVM or Clean-Architecture variations for mobile projects. They offer better separation of concerns and also better testability. 

So, if we think about a photo booth app, people always look for a more entertaining interaction and more options to have fun while capturing the moment. An MVVM (Model–View–ViewModel) software architectural pattern might be the go-to option as it uses a markup language (or GUI code) to separate the development of the graphical user interface. 
The Clean-Architecture is a great approach too because it ensures your app infrastructure is test-able, and independent of frameworks, UI, database, or any external agency.

Performance (app speed) for a smooth user experience

The waiting line for taking a picture is not going to be left unnoticed at events! 

For the best user experience, there shouldn't be any extra waiting time besides the typical countdown in between the takes. The struggle here is to optimize the entire process from taking the pictures to editing them and safely store and send them to the server. 

It's a matter of both app performance and good user experience. 

On the technical side, time-consuming actions like uploading photos should be done asynchronously, on background threads, without blocking the UI and the main thread until these actions are completed. 
Besides this, always keep in mind the balance between memory usage and computing efficiency! Sometimes it's better to store a value in the memory instead of calculating it again. In contrast, other times, the memory needs to be allocated wisely, only for the most important data.

Supporting Several File Formats

The speed with which trends change is mind-blowing. Nowadays, a photo booth has more features than taking a picture. It has transformed into a GIF or video booth. Make sure that your photo booth app supports different file formats for a full experience. 
Here are some file formats to ensure an entertaining photo booth app:

• Photo files: .jpg, or .jpeg;
• Graphics Interchange Format: .gif;
• Videos: .mov;
• Or, if you have a multi-camera photobooth with bullet-time-rig options for memorable captions and 3D shots: .raw

Test like there is no tomorrow - succeed like a king

In the entertainment industry, the quality of the product has a massive impact on user satisfaction. Imagine if the app crashes during a public event. It's quite an expensive fiasco that can lead to losing contractors and the overall disappointment of the final users. 
In this case, gradually testing the product is a life-saving vest and is a crucial step in the entire app development process. Before going live with a photo booth application, it should be tested using several Quality Assurance methods (Unit Testing, Manual Testing, or Automation testing). 

In the end, before starting the journey of building a photo booth app, make sure you have a verified product-oriented partner by your side who has the experience of building a similar project.

And if you want us to help you with creating a fresh new photo booth app, drop us a line, and we will answer you in less than 24h!

Let’s do this.