Case Study: Zipcar achieves rapid Android launch and a unified codebase with Appcelerator Titanium

Zipcar Ports Award-Winning Ios App To Titanium To Reach Android Customers

Zipcar, the world’s largest car-sharing service with locations across North America and London, offered an award-winning native iPhone app that let members reserve, locate, and lock cars from their phones. After a customer survey showed strong demand from Android users, Zipcar wanted to bring mobile development in-house and avoid maintaining separate iOS and Android codebases.

Zipcar chose Appcelerator Titanium to redevelop and expand its app, using its existing web team to build a native-feeling Android app in about three months and then port back to iPhone, reusing roughly 75% of the code (prototype in 14 days; production app in two months, iPhone port in about one month). The Titanium apps delivered native-level performance with faster startup and responsiveness, allowed a three-developer team to maintain both platforms efficiently, and accelerated Zipcar’s ability to iterate and scale its mobile strategy.

ZipCar

Goss Nuzzo

Software Engineer, ZipCar