Ricardo Pons Develops App For Mórbido, A Content Generator With 5 Million Daily Users

Azure. Xamarin. Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

They’re just some of the technologies Windows Development MVP Ricardo Pons used to develop the Mórbido Xamarin app - which offers video streaming, news, podcasts and other media for users on the go.

The platform was released for Android in March 2017, and was certainly no small feat to complete. Ricardo spent two years developing the app for Mórbido, a company that started out as a film festival, but now distributes media content to more than 5 million users across Latin America on a daily basis.

“I think this project is very interesting because I used many technologies working together,” said the Mexico-based MVP. “It’s a good example [of] what we can do using Azure, Xamarin & UWP.”

The project began when Mórbido realized the need to curate their media channels all in one place - TV, movies, social media, a website and a print magazine.

“The constant and dynamic transformation of the entertainment industry, coupled with the insatiable interest of our fans to consume all kinds of content at all times, everywhere and in all possible devices and our project being a multiplatform generator of content and events throughout Latin America, led us to the conclusion that a mobile app was the only real option we had to concentrate everything,” said Mórbido CEO Pablo Guisa Koestinger in this Microsoft Technical Case Study on GitHub.

In this, the company turned to the Microsoft DX team in Mexico, and Ricardo was recommended to be the Senior Developer on the project. The app is made to help Mórbido understand how many users are engaging with multiple channels, and collect more information on users to help advertise more effectively, etc.

Ricardo used a whole range of technologies to make the platform a reality. The app was built with Xamarin to ensure multi-platform capabilities, and UWP to deploy the client application to Xbox One and all Windows 10 Devices.

Ricardo also used Azure App Services to send information between the apps and the database, SQL Azure to store data, Azure Media Services to stream media content, and Microsoft Virtual Machines to stream the TV channel to Mexican company TotalPlay. He also worked with Windows Presentation Foundation, and Azure Storage Service to save images, videos and other content related to the applications.

Although he officially worked alone, Ricardo says Amin Espinoza and Vianey Gonzalez from DX Mexico played a big part in finding documentation, and helping to solve some technical issues - all in all, making the project better.

Interested in checking out the app? Take a look at the Mórbido app for Google Play here and UWP here. The app will launch for for iOS later this year.

And for more information on how the platform was built, see this case study on GitHub.