Application development has come of age for many, particularly now that it’s evident that mobile first is the best approach. Ask Instagram and Vine. Now OLX is now a global company with usage in 40 plus countries. The target is the mobile user who wants to sell with minimal work. Thus the deployment of apps on almost all platforms. They now have apps on iOS, Android, Nokia and Blackberry Apps Stores. Last I checked there was even an app on Windows App Store for desktop, this goes all the way to Windows tablets.
Now I am an Android user mostly, and this new app update was pushed today to bring in new features. First thing you will notice is the nice layout that has the most important things laid out to you. It picks your location so it shows you ads submitted from around you, the most recent ones. The category icons are also quite on point, they are beautiful and bring out the best for the general user interface.
Navigation
The app has the much loved flyout navigation that reveals the menus in a screen take-over from the left in, quite straight-forward. The update also brings in landscape navigation, just tilt your phone and it changes the screen orientation to reveal landscape mode.
When navigating onto the ads posted you are able to view photos in full screen with pinch to zoom enabled, so you can zoom in to that scratch you saw on that Mercedes. Contact options in the bottom are right where you’d want them with call, SMS and email options.
App use advancements
The app loads quite fast I must say, plus there is so many things you can do without needing to log in, the experience starts getting personalized even while you’re logged off.
Things you can do without logging in:
- You can post and manage ads without login or registration
- You can favourite ads
- Send replies
Now though not new, even the login or registration process is easy, there’s Facebook or email and password registration options. I don’t use Facebook on my phone but it’s OAUTH, just like all the big apps making the process fast and you can concentrate on the business of the day which is posting the adverts or searching for things to buy.
Search Options
Searching for items to purchase or window shop also has great features on it. You can search direct but should you want to zero in on something specific you can search by date: most recent, price either ascending or descending. Within the filters you can also choose to limit your search to only items with photos or even limit yourself to a certain category to get best output. Now you can choose to limit yourself to search within your locality, within your city or even widen it to the whole country. The app is usually limited to the country, so you won’t be searching in another country if you select yours. But within settings you can always change to a new country and even make everything manual, you know, widen options.
Another thing I found interesting was the support contact options. You have email, Whatsapp and Telegram. Atleast these are the apps that showed up on my phone based on what I have installed.
All in all, the app does what it says in the box and a review average of 4.2, based on half a million reviews the app sits right at the top of great apps.
