Effectiveness of a personal pulse agent (PPA) application development for smartphone users

In the era of technology globally, the use of smartphones in everyday life has become a primary need. In Indonesia, this situation started in 1915. This is shown by the growth of Internet usage reaching 56% of the Indonesian population. The use of smartphones shows much deserved growth. In 2020, the growth even exceeded 20% from 355.5 million at the end of 2019, to exceed Indonesia's population of 268.2 million, which reached 78.18% in 2020. This happens because many people have more than one smartphone. This means that the need for pulse is increasing. Meanwhile, smartphone users buy pulses and tokens from the bank application with an admin fee of between IDR1, 500-IDR3, 500 per transaction. It seems that this admin fee is quite expensive. Developing an application for smartphone users with a cheaper admin fee is seen as necessary. The purpose of developing the Personal Pulse Agent (PPA) application is to be able to serve smartphone users, their families, and neighbors. The development method of this research was waterfall, namely: system engineering, analysis, design, coding, testing, and maintenance. The results of the application development consist of a dashboard application managed by the admin and a personal pulse agent (PPA) application installed by smartphone users. Both applications can be installed on the same smartphone that can act simultaneously as an admin and an agent. The dashboard application is an Application Programming Interface (API) that serves as a bridge between smartphone users and a marketplace that manages sellers. The personal agent application is an application installed by smartphone users that has various types of features that function as a tool for making transactions. The benefit of the PPA application can be used to buy pulses, data packages, and electricity tokens independently with cheaper admin costs, so that smartphone users will be able to save their money for other purposes. This means that it can increase efficiency and effectiveness for smartphone users. In addition, the PPA application can be used as a tool to run a pulse agent business that is quite profitable because pulse, data packets, and electricity tokens are always needed and never go stale. Further research is needed to develop a management system of the PPA application to manage business as an agent for pulse, data packets, and electricity tokens.