Incognito Mode and Rebtel News Feed: Extending Calling App to improve the User Experience

Building a successful mobile app in a world which welcomes more than 1000 new apps everyday on Google Play Store and Apple Store is not an easy task. Tons of applications are duplicated, useless and sometimes, even if they are performing, the world might not be ready for them yet. However, by offering international calls and various services including Mobile Top Up and early access Remittance at a very competitive price, Rebtel Networks has risen in the last years generating a high revenue and customer satisfaction. Calling has been a profitable business for years, but it might not be the same in the near future, due to the rise in popularity of new free messaging/video calling services such as WhatsApp, Messenger and Skype. This is the main reason why establishing a good relationship with the customers and improving the user experience on the app are two fundamental aspects. My internship at Rebtel has been focusing on implementing two new features for the company’s existing calling app: Incognito Mode and Rebtel News Feed. The first one mentioned has become very popular in the last years. Browsers like Google Chrome offer their customers local privacy through Incognito Mode, and Rebtel is putting the same efforts in order to satisfy one of its users most asked requests, “Hidden CLI”. While a temporary version of the feature was already in place since earlier releases, with the help of the Design Team and Product Managers I redesigned the whole concept. Rebtel was founded on solid values. Family is definitely the most important. By analysing the main reasons why people call their relatives the most, during my internship I have explored another interesting idea which might be introduced on the application in the future: Rebtel News Feed. Being always up to date with what is going on in your own country is very difficult, especially if you live abroad and work many hours per day. This new feature would help the customers to get access to top headlines from a specific country of their interest, resulting into an increase in number of calls and in the average time a user spends daily on the app. My internship at Rebtel has been really productive and the amount of learnings, both from a business and technical prospective, has been huge. While Incognito Mode is already in production and shipped for the next release of the app, Rebtel News Feed needs to be studied carefully by the commercial team, in order to verify whether it can represent a real opportunity for business or not.