Mobile App for Frontline Workers in Southeast Asia | Jodoo

Discover how I led the transition from a PWA to a native mobile app to solve real user pain points for frontline workers in Southeast Asia. This product management case study covers mobile UX localisation, low-tech user behavior, login redesign, and push notification implementation. Learn how strategic prioritisation and cultural insight increased iOS app adoption from 30% to 78% within a month.

Role: Product Manager

Company: JODOO

Duration: 2023–2025

Market: Southeast Asia

Product: Mobile App (Android WebView + iOS PWA → Native iOS App)

❓ The Problem

“We already have an app. Why don’t the workers use it?”

This was a brutally honest question from a local manager during a user interview in Malaysia. Despite having launched our Android app (via WebView) and iOS PWA with all core features in place—except for push notifications—user adoption on the ground remained dismal.

Many tasks that should have been completed in-app were still being handled through WhatsApp. Some customers even enforced a workaround: workers had to submit a form in the app, screenshot it, and share it in their WhatsApp groups so supervisors would know to check the system.

Something clearly wasn’t working.

🔍 User Research Insights

I dug deeper to understand the gap between product availability and usage. Through qualitative interviews and field observations, I identified several critical misalignments between product assumptions and real-world behavior:

1. No Email, No Entry: Most frontline workers didn’t have email addresses. Even if they registered one, they often forgot their credentials. Their entire digital life revolved around phone numbers and WhatsApp groups.
2. Management Constraints: Admins were reluctant to provide company email addresses due to cost and high reset frequency. Maintaining accounts at scale wasn’t practical.
3. Automation Gap: We attempted a Zapier integration to send WhatsApp notifications. While technically functional, managers had no desire to learn a new tool or pay extra when they felt a simple in-app notification should have sufficed.

Lesson: A feature being technically usable doesn’t make it culturally usable.

⚙️ Technical Constraints & Legacy Architecture

The app’s poor usability was partially due to how it was built. In the beginning, we had no engineers experienced in native app development. To move fast:

• Android: Packaged the web app in a WebView shell
• iOS: Used PWA due to App Store restrictions on WebView-only apps

Neither solution supported push notifications out-of-the-box. The engineering team hoped to build notification functionality after releasing a unified native app for both platforms—but that kept getting delayed due to limited resources.

The result: a “half-baked” app that lingered without notifications for over 18 months.

🎯 Product Strategy Shift

In late 2024, with new engineering resources and greater influence on product direction, I proposed a stepwise native transition strategy:

✅ Phase 1: Native Login Experience

Instead of tackling everything at once, we would start with the lowest-risk, high-impact component: the login flow. Here’s how I approached it:

This approach ensured that:

• Existing users—regardless of registration method—could log in smoothly
• We avoided the cost and complexity of social login
• The feature aligned with the cultural norm of mobile-first, phone-based workflows

🚀 Result

In March 2025, we launched the native iOS app with push notification support and the new login experience.

• Within one month, 78% of active iOS users installed the new app
• Customer complaints about missed updates dropped significantly
• WhatsApp usage as a workaround was visibly reduced

💡 Key Learnings

• Global products need local thinking: A solution that works in China or the U.S. may fail in Southeast Asia if you don’t account for cultural, economic, and digital behavior differences.
• Build for behavior, not just features: Technically viable features mean nothing if they don’t match how people actually work.
• Start small, scale wisely: The native login revamp was a low-risk entry point that paved the way for further native development.

📌 TL;DR Impact