History of anything tells us the stories of transformation and gives us some crucial insights into the process of change. It is good to know from where anything started. There are times when you want to uncover the secrets or information about you or your family, right from the beginning. Since the world’s population was not as huge back then as it is now, it is possible that many people out there could be related to you in some ways. Thanks to the MyHeritage app, now you can learn about your family tree and history. The civilizations have prospered throughout the years, and so does technology. An app like MyHeritage, with the assistance of a vast database and AI, has made it possible to browse through your family tree and learn all about them.
You can not only form your family tree, but you can also animate the still pictures of your ancestors and turn them into lively Gifs. It is a fact that nostalgia hits you on a whole new level when you see those artistic GIFs. Apart from the recording saving of your family, you can also discover other people related to you or your ancestors.
The number of downloads of this app is skyrocketing high. The AI-based animation of still pictures has taken the world by storm. Everyone wants to see their grandparents or other ancestors in a lively form. With great popularity, the MyHeritage app development has created a sensational market in the mobile app development sector. In this blog, you will learn how to build a family tree app with all the necessary features and technologies needed.
What is MyHeritage App?
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Gilad Japhet developed the MyHeritage app in the year 2003. This family tree app used facial recognition software to perform search operations and scan photos, and connect people in the early stages. One year down the lane, the company acquired Pearl Street Software that transformed it in several ways. MyHeritage app advertises itself as a freemium company that creates family trees. Recently, it introduced an AI feature that animates still pictures regardless of their age. You can say it has its own picture animator app.
Earlier, the pictures were developed in the grey shade, and it was difficult to identify some things in those portraits. But with the help of MyHeritage, you can turn those pale pictures into colored images. With this platform, you can explore all the aspects of your ancestral lives and explore the history of your roots, documents, and DNA.
Since the app is based on a unique concept, naturally, it drew a considerable deal of attention. Currently, the app has a database of more than 160k family trees. This app operates in more than 100 languages and has a user base of 18 million users all over the world. The number of profiles on this platform cross the mark of 175 million, and over 100 million pictures were uploaded or generated on this family tree app. As of the current data, over 26 million animations have been created on this app.
The market is filled with chatter about these family tree platforms; since the revenue generation is remarkable, every new entrepreneur wants to start their MyHeritage app development. You can start it too; who knows, your app can surpass the statistics as mentioned above and be the next big thing.
Features to be Included in the MyHeritage App Development
Unique apps and features are being developed every day to awe the users and attract them to a respective platform. In the case of building a family tree app, there are some crucial features that should be included in your app development process. Here are some of the must-have features.
1. Registration
User registration is the most generic and essential feature of any app. Although, registration of a family tree app asks for added information from the users to analyze their history efficiently. Please ensure that your registration process is short and straightforward as users get irritated quickly with long registration forms. You can avail users of the option of registering through various social media handles. Users of any app appreciate the simplicity.
2. Family Timelines
These timelines are a graphical representation of the family members of a family in the form of a chart or diagram. This feature is essential and should be considered as the essence of your app. This feature allows users to scroll through their family stories and view their timelines with their family members’ names and dates. Users can explore the journey of their family heritage.
3. Smart Matches
The intelligent matching feature is a must-have in your app like MyHeritage. According to its name, the feature works according to its name; it creates a match based on the information available on two different profiles to analyze the relationship between them. If any relevant information is similar, it is added to the family tree section of the users. You can extend this feature further by allowing the users to choose which pieces of helpful information they need to extract from a confirmed match and add to their tree.
4. Research
As the name states, this feature allows users to learn about their ancestral lives with the help of billions of historical records available in the app’s database. This feature also allows users to dig deep into the history of their ancestors. With the help of this feature, users can compare the information with the matched profile’s family tree to discover the similarities and any new information about their history.
5. Photo Sharing
Who doesn’t want to share something new with their family and friends? MyHeritage app development process is no different. Hence, your app should have a sharing feature that allows users to share their AI animated pictures or the pictures of their family tree. Apart from sharing photos with others, this feature allows users to share pictures with different profiles and family trees.
6. Inbox
When the search results reveal some relatives across the globe of a user, it’s natural they want to contact them. On the other hand, people are concerned about their security. Hence, they would hesitate to share their contact information. To overcome this obstacle, this inbox feature comes into the picture and delivers an email-based messaging feature to communicate with them. The communication in this inbox is secure, and the individual contact information of the users is not shared. You can implement this feature in your app like MyHeritage. Users can use this feature to send and receive messages and discover more about their family history.
7. In-built Scanner
Physical documents and photos can be destroyed because of various factors; hence, saving them in your app can help in preserving them. A scanner feature helps the users to preserve their vintage images digitally by utilizing their device’s camera to scan them. Your app’s scanner should be able to scan historical documents, printed old photos, etc. Users can use the digital form of the scanned images for various purposes. Please ensure to include this feature in your MyHeritage app development.
8. Photo Colorizations
After the users have scanned their old photos, it is possible that they need some enhancement in terms of color. This feature allows users to turn their old grey photos into color. You can ask your mobile app development company to integrate this feature in your app, like MyHeritage.
Please ensure, this feature must not destroy the old images, instead create a new copy alongside. This feature should be able to work on every kind of scanned photo, even faded ones with hints of color in them.
9. AI Photo Animator
MyHeritage app has named this feature- Deep Nostalgia. With the help of Artificial intelligence, this feature animates the still photographs into GIFs that seem lively. AI photo animator is an advanced feature that can boost your app’s popularity and revenue.
These animators work with the help of several possible sequences of human face gestures and implement them in the scanned photos. These gestures are extracted from a pre-recorded driver video. Further, the driver videos manipulate the movements in the animation of the selected photographs. The end result makes the person in the photo blink, turn their heads, roll their eyes, and smile, making it lively.
Development Process
Building a family tree app can be a complicated task as it is a unique concept. But with efficient market research, brainstorming, and implementation, you can efficiently complete your MyHeritage app development process. While developing an app, the most crucial step is to collect data on the subject. It can be about current market trends, competitors, and the expectations of the customers.
Conduct efficient market research with the goal of identifying your competitors, their strategies, monetization models, market trends, and the future of the sector. These pieces of information will help you in carving a solid roadmap. With a compelling blueprint of your project, you can easily guide the process. The market research can either be done by your in-house team, or for diligent results; you can hire a market research agency. Further, you can brainstorm with your management team about the budget for this project, as this will be a variable factor in this development process.
1. Technologies to Consider
The technological stack of the development of an excellent app like MyHeritage consists of various programming languages and web servers. Your MyHeritage app development process should consist of an efficient set of technologies to make it reliable and fast. Since these apps deal with lots of data storage hence, there will be a need for a steady web server.
Frontend development should be attractive and straightforward at the same time. This is the part your users will interact with your app, and you should ask your app developers to deliver a design that allure the users. On the other hand, the backend development should be implemented with precision as these apps have to deal with extra maintenance.
The list of the technology used in such apps is diversified and long. Here are the technologies that should be considered in the development process for an extraordinary performance. For the purpose of the application, you should consider JavaScript, jQuery, Python, PHP, React, NGINX, Java, CloudFlare, Apache HTTP Server, Bootstrap, jQuery UI, CSS 3, Modernizr, Ruby, Go, Animate.css, Slick, C++, Objective-C, Scala, fancybox, C, Select2, PowerShell, Perl, Incapsula, Groovy, etc.
For the purpose of various utilities within the app, you should consider Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Maps, Gravity Forms, Dyn, Hotjar, etc.
2. Team Requirements
The development process needs a team of mobile app developers. However, it will solely depend on the budget allocated for this development process. To build a family tree app, you can choose to go with the option of hiring a freelance development team or a full-fledged mobile development app company.
In the first option, you have to hire each team member individually. There will be vast chances of incoordination and disagreements between the members that will affect the quality and performance of the finished product.
On the other hand, mobile app development comes with an organized camp. Their development team is in coordination and is supervised appropriately. They are most likely to deliver you a diligent, reliable, and efficient app like MyHeritage. However, the team structure will consist of a project manager for supervision of the team, two or three app developers, a QA for the quality analysis of the project, a Tester for testing of the app for any bugs and errors, and a UI/UX designer for creating the artistic design of your family tree app.
3. Cost to Develop
In the case of MyHeritage app development, the cost is a variable factor. The capital involved will depend on various factors like the number of features, technological stack implemented, development team, etc.
The cost will increase in case if you choose to proceed with the AI photo animator feature in your project. The design of hiring a team of developers, either freelance or a mobile app development company, will fluctuate your budget estimate. The number of platforms on which you want to develop your app will also affect the numbers on your budget. Apart from these factors, the cost will also depend on the region in which you want to develop your app, as different regions have different mobile app development charges.
Wrapping Up
An App like MyHeritage is the need of the hour. It has earned a good reputation with extraordinary features like AI photo animator, photo enhancement, photo colorization, ancestral history, etc. The family tree app sector is filled with new opportunities, and despite various prevailing apps, there is still enough room for a new similar app with advanced functionality.
Matellio can help you build the family tree app of your expectations. Our proficient team of developers has delivered several apps like MyHeritage with great ratings and excellent customer feedback. Our experienced mobile app developers are well-rehearsed with the technologies behind such apps are ready to deliver you the application of your dreams. If you have got an idea to build a family tree app, connect to us, and we can get started right away.
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