The Client
The product has two sides, the app and a play-based curriculum; we build the app. It runs on iOS and Android in six languages and is funded through a mix of revenue and investment. We have been the engineering team behind the app for around four years, improving what is there and building what comes next.
How we work
Chat is a good example. She had a handful of screens in mind, but messaging across families and provider groups needed more than that to hold together, so we scoped and designed the fuller version and built it. Reminders followed the same path, a light task-assignment layer for things like a scheduled fire drill or prep tied to a specific child.
What the app does
Providers record activities and events as they happen or schedule them ahead, meals, naps, diaper changes, and the learning activities the program is built around, each with a time and an optional photo, all kept as history. Sleep checks are a more detailed version of the same idea. While a child naps, the provider records position and breathing at a set interval, and every check is saved. Time tracking runs alongside, logging how long each child was present, which later feeds the reports.
Photos upload to shared albums that notify the whole family. A provider looking after children from several families at once can group them and record one activity across the group. The calendar holds planned and completed events, including recurring ones set months ahead, and a child's activity can be exported as a PDF report for parents.
Billing runs through Stripe. The provider issues an invoice and tracks its status while the parent pays through a link. Subscriptions come in a free tier and two paid ones that set how large a family can grow. The app is fully localized into six languages: English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Armenian, Russian, and Somali.
What we're building now
This is the first of three phases and runs a few months. Around it, the calendar is being rebuilt to hold activities as well as events, plans become reusable templates, and, further out, providers will be able to publish plans and rate how an activity went so others can see what worked. Annie had dismissed this idea a year ago; now it's a priority.
They look to first understand what we're looking to accomplish and work together for the most efficient and effective way to get there. The team was able to find solutions to each of the challenges we gave them. The app speed is fast, and they were able to efficiently add more features while continuing to improve performance.
Outcome
Tech Stack
Frontend: React Native 0.83 / React 19 (iOS and Android), TypeScript 5.8, React Navigation 6 | State & data: Redux Toolkit, Redux Saga, React Redux, Axios, Formik + Yup, AsyncStorage | UI: UI Kitten + Eva Design (components and theming), Reanimated + Gesture Handler, Victory Native (charts), Gifted Chat | Mobile services: Firebase (Auth, Firestore, Realtime Database, Storage), OneSignal (push), react-native-iap (in-app purchases), Sentry (crashes), Amplitude (analytics), Appcues (onboarding) | Backend: Java 17, Spring Boot 3.1.2, Gradle, Spring Web MVC + Thymeleaf (email templates and i18n in six languages), Spring Data JPA + Hibernate, Hypersistence Utils, QueryDSL 5.0, Flyway | Auth & security: Spring Security + OAuth2 Resource Server, JWT via AWS Cognito | Database & storage: PostgreSQL 15 (AWS RDS, eu-central-1), HikariCP, AWS S3 | Media & documents: javacv-platform, metadata-extractor, thumbnailator (image and video processing, thumbnails), openpdf (PDF reports) | Integrations: Stripe, OpenAI GPT (theokanning openai-gpt3-java), Apple App Store Server Library, Google API Client, Klaviyo, Mailgun, OneSignal | Tooling: Spring Cloud OpenFeign 4.0.3, Lombok + MapStruct 1.5.5, Springdoc OpenAPI (Swagger UI), Spring Boot Actuator, ShedLock, Testcontainers (PostgreSQL) + JUnit 5
