NAF Charge. Mobile App for EV drivers in Norway

The challenge

The mobile application is available to the client’s already registered users, without the need to create an additional account. The number of active users, combined with the client’s highly trusted brand, meant that the app had to be load-resistant and reliable. The main objective of the app was to integrate multiple charging operators to give users the ability to charge their vehicles at any charging station. The biggest challenge was the operators using different communication protocols and third-party platforms (for instance OCPI protocol, Hubject platform via OICP protocol, etc). All operations between the user’s device and the charging point are asynchronous and go over the Internet via many different systems. This added extra complexity to the solution and raised some difficulties, not only in terms of communication with the user but also in handling multiple exceptions and edge case scenarios. We managed to deal with it. Testing was crucial – due to numerous dependencies and scenarios, this was not an application that could be fully tested on a test environment, even with good coverage of unit and integration tests. Quality has always been our priority, so we conducted field tests (together with the customer), where we used real vehicles and real charging points in Norway to test the solution.