On an average day, 4000 new mobile apps are published on AppStore and Google Play. At the same time, 80-90% of those apps fail to attract users and end up abandoned after the first launch.

Every day we go over dozens of ideas for new services. We have sieved through the development requests that we received in the current and previous year, and created a list of typical apps that are most sought after by our customers and also attract users’ interest. If you would like to know what they are, why users need them, and how to monetize them, then keep on reading.

Fitness apps

Why are they in demand?

The trend towards health and fitness has grown even stronger since the start of 2021. People all around the world want to stay fit and well and are looking for services that can help with that.

What do these services do?

An ideal fitness app helps to select exercise routines, teaches how to do them correctly, generates customized workouts, and tracks user progress.

How to monetize them?

Native ad integrations. Manufacturers of sports nutrition and equipment will most likely be interested in collaborating with fitness services, and ads for their products can be easily integrated into apps.

Subscription-based access to premium features. The premium version of the app can have more advanced analytics, personalization, and a custom workout builder.

Sharing services

Why are they in demand?

Consumer demands are growing faster than revenues. In this day and age, it often makes more sense to pay for temporary access to a product than to own it.

For example, in a metropolitan area it is sometimes cheaper to use a car sharing service than to own a vehicle: there are no maintenance and repair costs, no parking fees, and no time wasted in traffic. When you rent a car, you only pay for the time you need it.

Another popular trend of the sharing economy is buying second-hand goods. People exchange clothes, dress in thrift stores, and some people do not buy new things on principle, on the grounds of sustainability or environmental awareness.

What do these services do?

Well, there is no point in inventing another eBay. Users are more likely to be attracted by highly segmented services, like apps for buying and selling pre-owned baby items, book exchange apps, car sharing apps, or apps for renting photo and video equipment.

How to monetize them?

Commission. You can charge a commission on each in-app transaction as the payment for using the service.

Telehealth services

Why are they in demand?

The year 2020 has taught us the importance of at least two things: medical services and remote interactions. The ability to receive professional specialist services from the convenience of your own home appeals to both users and businesses.

What do these services do?

People need these apps to be able to remotely consult doctors, therapists, yoga instructors, or family counselors. A service of this type must provide a seamless remote interaction between medical professionals and their clients: users must be able to choose specialists, chat with them, and set up video sessions.

Besides healthcare aggregator apps, medical network apps with similar features also look quite interesting. The ability to provide convenient remote services to its patients will boost any clinic’s popularity and, potentially, its revenue.

How to monetize them?

Commission. You can monetize such a service by charging a percentage on all transactions completed in the app.

Placement fee. A fixed fee for displaying a specialist's profile to potential clients.

Ads. Specialists themselves can purchase ads from the service to secure a place at the top of search results in the app.

In the case of apps for medical facilities, the facility will make a profit from selling its services.

Segmented marketplaces

Why are they in demand?

Large online marketplaces are not sufficiently adapted to specific needs and behaviors of consumers in individual market segments.

What do these services do?

They offer a niche retail experience to a specific consumer group. For example, it can be an online marketplace for new parents, or an aggregator app offering pet products.

How to monetize them?

In the same way as in the previous case: ads and commissions.

To sum it up, the leading trends are segmentation of consumer needs, remote communication, reuse and repurposing, and direct interaction without the middleman.

PWAs are web applications that use progressive enhancement strategy, which means that they check whether the browser supports certain Web APIs, and if it does, then they can use them. Hence the name - Progressive Web Apps.

Some trivia

The term was coined in 2015 by Google engineer Alex Russel and his spouse Frances Berriman.

The idea behind PWA is not new – the main concept goes as far back as Palm webOS, Firefox OS, and Chrome OS, where all apps are essentially web apps.

Back in 2007, 18 days before the release of the first iPhone, Steve Jobs announced the idea that apps will be created using web technology and will be delivered over the network. Initially, there were no plans for the App Store, and the native SDK was not available in the device’s first year on the market.

Here are some well-known PWAs: Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, AliExpress, Spotify, TikTok, Tinder, Pinterest, YouPorn, Google and Microsoft services.

Here’s another interesting fact: there is a community-approved PWA logo. The first person to point out that the technology needed its own logo was Maxim Salnikov from the Microsoft DevRel team, who in May 2017 put out a word on Twitter inviting everyone to submit their proposals  on GitHub . The winning logo, selected by popular vote, was the submission from Diego Gonzalez. At that time, Diego was a part of the DevRel team for Samsung Internet, one of the most popular mobile browsers in Asia. Not long ago Diego joined the Microsoft Edge DevRel team.

Advantages

We talked to Mercury’s lead front-end developer, evangelist and PWA enthusiast Alexey Rodionov about the advantages and shortcomings of progressive web apps.

They are truly cross-platform

PWAs can run on devices of any form factor, on any architecture and OS — all they need is a browser and internet access. They will run on all kinds of devices: wearable electronics, smart TVs, VR/AR goggles, and even such unimaginable devices as smart mirrors, while a single code base reduces development and support costs.

Native behavior

PWAs look and work like native apps: they integrate deep into the OS, are launched via an icon on the home screen, can receive push notifications, can work offline, and can access device hardware sensors, such as camera, microphone, Bluetooth, USB, NFC, and others.

No updates to install

To use a PWA, you just need to visit the website. When you first launch the app, all the code it needs to run will be cached, and the cache will be automatically updated in the background.

Smaller size

PWAs themselves do not implement APIs — they just call browser APIs. At startup, they load the bare minimum, and then add the rest as needed.

PWAs are decentralized, open, and independent

The Web is the largest platform, larger than all other platforms put together. To distribute PWAs, you do not need app stores that impose their own rules. However, if desired, a PWA can be packaged in a light native wrapper and published on Google Play, App Store, or any other store.

All advantages of a web platform

A PWA is a website, which means that all content is indexed by search engines. Each page has its own URL, which can be copied and shared – this is like deep linking out of the box. Also, the user can copy any text on the screen and translate it into another language, can zoom the page in and out, remove ads, and do many other things.

Security

PWA code is executed in the browser sandbox, and the secure HTTPS connection is used to load the code and transfer data. Also, web apps use a more secure permissions model. For example, unlike native Android apps, PWAs request user permission to receive push notifications, access NFC, etc.

Low entry threshold

To write a PWA, one does not need to learn proprietary SDKs — the knowledge of HTML, JS, and CSS is all one needs. The development does not require any special equipment, you can even do without an IDE or a compiler – JavaScript code is interpreted and can be debugged in the browser.

If you already have a web app or a website, you can gradually integrate various Web APIs.

Shortcomings

PWAs are not equally supported by different platforms. For example, all iOS browsers must use WebKit instead of their own engine, and WebKit does not support certain APIs. In particular, browsers on iOS devices do not support Web Push API, which is required to deliver push notifications.

Before you start developing an application, you need to understand what this application is about: what it is expected to do, how many screens it should have, and how future users will interact with it. To figure all that out, we thoroughly examine a customer’s idea and then create a prototype of the future app. Here is how we do it.

1. Communicating with the customer

It is important to understand the purpose of the app and to work out what features the app needs, while trying not to get bogged down in details. It is better to concentrate on the concept itself and leave details to be hammered out in the process.

2. Looking for similar apps.

Or, to be more exact, services that address similar needs. Before you create something new, it’s worth having a look at what is already out there.

3. Drafting wireframes

Next, we formulate requirements and, for each of the major features, we work out user flows: the sequence of actions the user has to perform to reach their goal. We create wireframes on paper or in graphics editor software.

4. Designing positive flows

For each screen, we do a rough mockup. We usually use Figma, but Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, or Balsamiq will do just as fine. Then we organize screens into flows, adding arrows and comments, like “click button A to open screen B”.

5. Adding error screens

We think through alternative scenarios, when users fail to achieve their goals. When that happens, the app should inform the user that an error has occurred or that the operation failed. Such cases are also added to our wireframes.

6. Crash test

The entire team gets together to discuss the flows we have come up with. Anything deemed not user-friendly gets discarded, and we brainstorm how we can improve the UX. This ritual is repeated until our user scenarios are bulletproof.

7. Product demo

We combine screens into a prototype – clickable or with arrows – and demonstrate it to the customer. After the demo, customers will almost always want to change one thing or another. This is nothing to worry about, we don’t claim to have the ability to read our customers’ minds.

8. Fine-tuning

We make the requested adjustments and do another demo. When everyone is happy, the finalized user flows are handed over to designers or to developers to prepare estimates.

Our recommendations:

Use fewer colors

We do not use colors for prototypes. During the analysis phase, we prefer to keep things neutral – this helps to concentrate on application functionality without getting distracted by the colors of the buttons.

… and more movement

A clickable prototype will help the team to identify any missing screens and will give the customer a better idea of how the app will work, and will also generate more feedback.

In Mercury, we do a lot of work with startups, where functionality constantly changes, and the code is rewritten from sprint to sprint. If you write an automated test, and then the team decides to make changes to the software, your test may quickly become obsolete, which means that instead of saving the time and expenses, as expected, we have to spend additional effort constantly fixing our tests.

Ever-developing products

Our team had the same experience with our own product. Initially we thought that manual testing of a large project takes too long, and automation is needed. But then we came to realize that our QA team was struggling to keep up with a product that would change from sprint to sprint, that is, literally, every two weeks.

We had a situation when we were migrating an application from Xamarin to native, and a part of the native code was rewritten in React Native. The team spent many hours rewriting everything for a new interface.

As a result, we had to give up on all UI tests: it takes too much time to support them, they always lag behind the rest of the project, critical issues are too often overlooked, and the tests crash because the technology is far from perfect.

Automation that we use

From our experience, we identified five types of automation that we use when working with quickly developing projects.

API tests

We test client/server interaction. As a rule, the protocol is stable, and any changes implemented on the front end or on the backend do not affect the client/server interaction. We simulate client requests and, in rare cases, server responses.

For client requests, we usually use Postman, along with several in-house solutions built on reliable libraries and frameworks. We use Python in combination with Requests, or Ruby with REST Client.

To simulate server responses we usually use spoofers, such as Fiddler, Burp Suite, Charles Proxy. We set up API tests to run automatically several times a day and check if the prod is working correctly.

Testing critical functionality

Any new build is a high error risk. In this case we use automated smoke testing to quickly identify and fix bugs at an early stage, without wasting any valuable time on software that we know is unstable.

Load testing

We are currently experimenting with automated load tests. It is still too early to draw conclusions, but potentially this can help developers to detect performance degradation already at the code writing stage, and also help QA engineers to save time spent on regression load testing.

End-to-end test scripts for stable functionality

Even in ever-changing projects, there eventually comes the time when some of the application’s functionality becomes relatively stable. When that happens, we use automated tests, and they really save us a lot of time.

Unit testing

Developers review functional test cases and check methods inside the code. This is the most correct approach, but at this point one may feel tempted to continue writing functional code instead of writing a test for the code each time. It is not often that we can allocate enough development hours and implement unit tests, that’s why we don’t use them frequently.

In other cases we usually do manual testing. QA engineers think through a case, test it, and we get results right away.

When automation makes sense

In the case of a startup, automated testing usually works as follows:

1.   first we come up with a test case

2.   then we write a test

3.   next, we fix this test

4.   back to step 1.

If a project changes quickly, tests become obsolete even quicker. It is often the case that supporting them does not justify the effort required from the team. This process takes up too much valuable time, so every time we ask ourselves: wouldn’t it be easier to do manual testing?

Automated testing is a must for an enterprise product -- a complex product with many repetitive actions, where it is impossible to find bugs manually. Such companies usually budget for extra time to be spent on process automation; also, the product functionality is more stable, and tests do not need to be rewritten every fortnight.

In our case, every project is different, so before we decide if automation makes sense in a particular case, we ask ourselves “Does it have more pros than cons?” for at least some part of the functionality. If the answer is yes, then we use automation.

In reality, automated testing is still a developing area, and available tools are limited:

• not all languages can be used for automation
• the core of the test framework often needs to be spruced up manually
• tools for analyzing results are far from perfect.

Nevertheless, as we said in the beginning, the future belongs to automation. Even now, the job of QA engineers who do not have advanced skills in automated testing is to prepare test scenarios, while the job of test automation engineers and developers is to build the automation core.

The industry is developing rapidly, and in about five years most of manual UI testing will most likely be covered by simple human-readable scenarios. That’s what we hope for and wait for to happen.

To sum it up

Using automated testing on any project requires a combination of several things: a correctly selected testing strategy, complex analysis, and flexible approach. Here at Mercury, we have worked on many projects, but are yet to come up with a universal “rule”.

However, we have identified several scenarios where automation most often pays off, even with frequently changing products:

• we test client/server interaction
• we do smoke testing before releasing a new version
• we try to automate load tests
• we test areas with stable functionality
• we like unit tests and can’t have enough of them.

When writing this article, we wanted to share our experience, and we also tried to answer one of the most complex questions in software testing. And even though we have not yet reached a definitive conclusion, we hope that our findings will help our team to come up with a smart approach to automation in ever-developing products.

Among the many different project management tools available today, Trello and Jira are the most popular ones. We asked Kirill, one of our project managers, for some tips on choosing the right tool for your team.

What are their similarities?

-   Both are used to manage flexible teams: Kanban and Scrum.

-   Both offer free options for limited-size teams and with a limited number of extensions.

-       Both have interfaces for tracking the project team progress.

-       Both provide convenient communication between team members.

-       Both offer applications for iOS and Android.

-       Both can be integrated with other services.

What tasks are best suited for Trello?

We have identified at least three types of tasks for which here at Mercury we usually use Trello.

Personal task tracker

Mercury managers routinely use this service as a daily planner. Trello cards are very convenient for noting down your ideas and setting tasks for the week. Kanban allows to visualize the progress of individual tasks, and the Calendar extension makes it easy to manage weekly and monthly workloads.

Managing smaller projects

Trello is an ideal tool for organizing small teams working on simple projects that don’t require automation and reporting. The simple interface and the service flexibility allow to quickly create a transparent workflow.

Business process management

Trello’s user interface can easily be configured for different tasks and departments: marketing, design, external consulting, or support services. Task automation and reporting capabilities are usually not required. To work comfortably with the product, general visualization of workflows is quite sufficient.

On the whole, the product offers a flexible solution for managing business projects in different areas, such as marketing, education, design, engineering, and many others. For these purposes, the service offers various extensions (Power-Ups) which, in combination with Trello interface, create a convenient project management platform.

With the free version, you can only select one Power-up, but this is usually quite sufficient for smaller teams with a limited pool of tasks and few team roles.

In our company, we use Trello in combination with Butler, which is a bot that helps to automate your work and create your own workflow. It can be trusted to handle repetitive tasks, which saves a lot of time when working on a project.

Trello is a systematized list of notes with a user interface adapted for small digital teams that do not use comprehensive technical processes. It will be a good fit for anyone who wants to jump into work right away. You can learn your way around the interface in less than a day, and the paid version of the product comes with additional components that allow to fine-tune the workflow for a cross-functional project team and customize the tool for a variety of business tasks.

What tasks are best suited for Jira?

There are several types of projects that can benefit from being managed in Jira, but we combined all of them into one.

Technically complex projects

Jira’s user interface is less convenient as compared to Trello. Working with the system involves a large overhead: there are many actions that do not solve the main task but still need to be performed just to be able to work in Jira.

In addition to that, this product is more difficult to configure. While in Trello you can get all set up and ready to start working within an hour, in Jira this won’t be possible. A manager will need some time to first set up the working environment in accordance with the project’s tasks, and then explain the workflow to the team.

Working in Jira is so complicated because this service has very comprehensive functionality that allows to manage complex multiple-role projects where automation and reporting play a crucial part.

Here is a list of possibilities Jira offers to its users:

-       The system will assign numbers to tasks and can generate detailed reports on tickets, which are Jira’s structural units similar to Trello’s cards.

-       Task descriptions in Jira tickets can be several times longer than in Trello, taking up multiple pages.

-       The product allows to restrict access to a project and to configure the workflow according to the team’s goals.

-       Jira automatically checks input data and can predict your next action.

-       This service provides comprehensive reporting functionality: you can create Burndown diagrams and roadmaps that are similar to Gantt charts, you can also track releases and export sprint reports.

Jira programming language, JQL, deserves a special mention. It allows to create custom filters for project tickets. With such a filter, it will take the development team lead just a couple of clicks to find how many critical bugs were reported in the project over the last three months, and draw the conclusions.

But the most important thing is that the standard tool set is available even in the free version of the product. Paid subscription will give you more space in the cloud storage, extended functionality, and the ability to add third-party applications from the official store.

When working on IT projects, we usually integrate Jira with third-party services. The most frequently used ones are Gitlab, Slack, Jenkins, and Zendesk.

Jira is better suited for large-scale technical projects with many roles. Unlike its competitor, it provides automated workflow, detailed reports with graphs and charts, and error management. In Jira, you can select between local and cloud hosting, which may be useful for companies running their own servers.

Jira is essentially a database. This product was developed for larger teams and complex projects.  Before you can work comfortably with this tool, you’ll need to spend a lot of time configuring it and creating a suitable workflow.

Advantages and disadvantages

Pricing

Now let’s touch upon the pricing policy of these two products, which is quite interesting. Most often, the Jira solution is purchased by companies with 100-500 employees, while Trello is used by smaller teams. Correspondingly, Jira subscription starts from $10 a month for up to 10 users, while Trello costs $10 per user per month. The developer of these two products is looking to make money by providing the same value for users of both products.

So, what should I choose?

You should choose Jira if...

...you are a team of ten working on a complex technical project: writing software for a new robot vacuum cleaner, or a pregnancy tracker app.

Or maybe you are a manager in a large company and you are looking for something to help you organize a multi-role team. For example, your project team has software developers, QA engineers, and business analysts, and you want to bring them all together in a single workflow.

You should choose Trello if...

…you need to organize the work of a small digital team in a short time. Perhaps you are setting up advertising for a company, or launching a new product, or need a convenient CRM tool

Or maybe you need to organize yourself. We use Trello as an advanced self-management tool, and we very much like the flexibility it offers.

Let’s sum it up

Selecting the right tool always depends on how you intend to use it. Some people may be inclined to select the service that offers more comprehensive functionality, thinking that it will bring better results. However, the key here is not to go over the top: there is no point in using a complex tool for simple tasks.

Complex functionality makes sense only when the overhead of integrating it into your business process is less than the losses incurred in its absence. From our experience, the simpler the solution, the better the results.

These are words I am sure we have all muttered at some point. As mobile apps continue to grow year over year, more and more people are looking create the next monster app. We see it everyday, "I have a million dollar app idea, but I have no idea how this works." Or, "I have the next Uber, and I have $10,000 to build it!" As you continue to research app development companies, and how to market apps, you quickly realize the process is much more daunting than originally anticipated. This post aims to assist you on your journey to tech entrepreneurship. Part 1, will focus on what you should focus on prior to reaching out to any potential development companies.

So let's help answer the age old question of, "I have a great idea... Now what?"

First things first. Think through your idea as thoroughly as possible.

Identify the following questions:

1. What is the purpose of the app?
2. What current challenge or inefficiency does it solve?
3. Who is my target audience?
4. What is the competitive landscape?
5. What is the total market opportunity?

These are 5 very basic questions, but you would be surprised how many people do not think this through before continuing along the journey. Creating a business plan that answers these questions is a great start to determining if the investment in your app is worthwhile.

Second, try to identify what your MVP entails.

MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. An MVP includes the absolute necessary features the app needs to achieve its purpose and solve the identified inefficiency. If you seek to build the next TikTok/Facebook/Instagram/Uber or other highly successful viral app, you need to understand that they have invested MILLIONS of dollars into those platforms. The good news though, is that most of these companies started out just like you. By identifying the core features vs. the "nice to have" features, you will be better able to set a budget and communicate the goals to a potential investor or development partner.

Third, set a realistic budget.

What available funds do you have that you are willing to invest in your idea? Do you need to raise money through family/friends, Angels, or VC's? If so put this in your business plan so as you start reaching out to potential partners, you can provide them with realistic expectations. If you are unsure if you will need outside investment, understand that very few worthwhile MVP's can be completed under $50,000.

Fourth, research current apps in the market that either compete with your idea, or you really enjoy from a user perspective.

If competitors exist, read through the reviews on the app store and determine what they do well, and where they fall short. Identify how your app can solve these pain points, and attract users. Also think about how you want the app to look and feel. Which apps are visually appealing to you? This will give your development partner a better idea of your aesthetic preferences.

So, in conclusion, completing these four steps upfront will dramatically improve the process as you continue the journey. Once you have all of these items identified, you are ready to continue on to part 2, finding the right partner.

Standby :)

COVID-19 has greatly impacted businesses and individuals globally. With the rapid spread of the virus, lockdowns and quarantines are forcing companies around the world to rethink how they get work done.

The number of companies who are encouraging their employees to work from home grows with the number of the infected: a recent survey supported that 46% of organizations started implementing remote work in March in response to the COVID-19 epidemic. This includes large tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter and Airbnb, who employ hundreds of thousands of employees globally. While having employees work from home may sound like an obvious choice for businesses, for many this is easier said than done. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, as recently as two years ago, only 29% of Americans held positions where they could work from home, and even less (24%) actually did.

Virtually every company will face unexpected challenges from COVID-19. Even by the most optimistic estimates, a successful vaccine for the virus is not expected to appear until next year. It is now becoming clear that businesses will have to adapt to these harsh conditions and modify their usual work format throughout the duration of this time. How will companies that are unable to transfer their employees to home offices, for some reason, handle this? How will those new to working from home adapt to unforeseen challenges? Is your company ready to meet the new reality?

During these uncertain times, businesses need to manage both the safety of their employees and the needs of their clients.

No matter how thoroughly you plan your company’s transition to remote work, you will still, almost certainly, face difficulties. Even those with "robust contingency plans" have had to test to make sure their system will work. Your company needs may range from upgrading technical equipment, to setting up remote access, learning and using new software, creating an online presence for your customers, among other possibilities, in addition to taking care of employees.

Many employees may find themselves setting up home offices for the first time, or learning new remote access software and task tracking techniques under conditions of limited communication, all while under the stress of adapting to a new home routine. From mandated self-isolation and the lockdown of schools and childcare, families are finding themselves bound together at home. These conditions can cause disruptions that inadvertently lead to circumstances such as slowdown in communication, and the need to formalize routine tasks.

To keep business running smoothly, it is important for companies to maintain interaction within their team, but business are also built on external communications. In the context of the epidemic and the general transition to online, companies have to find avenues to reach their audiences and establish effective ways of communication with regular customers and partners. Whether you need a new software solution such as a website, upgrades or maintenance to your current software, need to fulfill a certain role not currently on your team, or otherwise to be successful in a current climate, having a company in your book of contact to help with your needs or outsourcing work, can be a good option during these times.

The main advantage of outsourcing during quarantine is that we take on all the challenges of the remote work, while our clients don’t have to worry about it at all.

As an international custom software development company of 20 years, Mercury Development has gained ample experience working as a distributed team and have established processes to ensure high quality and productivity of work. In the face of COVID-19, with a vast number of ongoing projects, Mercury leadership made swift decisions that prioritized our services’ integrity and our employees’ health. After purchasing extra hardware and adding new servers with a stable VPN infrastructure (for remote access), we were able to effectively transfer over 300 employees to work remotely.

From analysis and design, to web, mobile, and IoT development, to troubleshooting, we have many customers who outsource their software development to us, located all over the world, and we have a well-established and refined online communication process with them. Adapting to various time differences, even during our standard mode of operation, our project managers and business analysts often communicate with the customers while at home rather than in the office. We are constantly connected to ensure easy and efficient communication for our customers at any time they need us.

Over our many years, we’ve accumulated plenty of funny stories about those  calls from working remote: meetings when you and have to deal with a child (or sometimes more than one) crying nearby, a neighbor endlessly drilling something, or taking a call while you’re on your commute. Likewise, our customers also know how to keep up — calling us from the New York subway, eating donuts during the meeting (and they can’t share with us), and showing us houses, children, and pets (sometimes none of which are their own).

For those new to remote work, it may seem stressful and unconventional to have these things happen, but they come with the territory and are met with grace. The conditions are temporary and eventually the situation will stabilize to where we will all get to return to our precious office routines.

The coronavirus outbreak is a difficult period for society, especially for businesses, but the way to handle it over the next few months will help us create a new format to follow in the future. Outsourcing software development is an obvious and painless way for companies looking for online points of contact with customers, and the business sphere as a whole. The creation of elastic workplaces, efficient BCPs, and distributed workforces can be an answer to uncertain times and allow employees to serve their customers better, ensuring business continuity.

If you need to create an online brand and shop, adapt your current business platform to updated mobile or web applications,  or have other software needs, Mercury Development is happy to help and you get through this difficult time as comfortably as possible:

mercdev.com/what-we-do/covid-crisis