A beautiful companion app from and for the students of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla.

As student of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla since high school I was always looking for a way to make my student life easier and more convenient.

One of the things that always baffled me is how the university was not providing a good way to access the information that they were providing to the students, they did try with an app that was not really good, it was slow, buggly, slow and not very intuitive to use.

At the time I was not a really experienced developer so the idea of revamping the app was not really appealing since all my programming knowledge was little Python or Java scripts that I used to mod games.

But around 2021, I was already my 4th semester of college and I had already released Abbey so I decided to give it a try.

Every year the university celebrated this sort of project fair (FEPRO) so it looked like a good opportunity to do my best and try to make a good app.

An app was already in production at the time, it was the second attempt the university made but to be honest it wasn’t any better than the first one.

So I decided to start from scratch and create a new app that would be more user friendly and more intuitive to use. At the time Flutter was reaching their 2.0 release and I wanted my app to be multiplatform so it was a no brainer. It was my first time using it so I needed to learn the framework fast since I only had a couple of months to work in the project before the presentation.

The first issue was “were will the data come from?” The university was not providing public access to the data so I had to find a way to get it, and that’s when it hit me 💡, since I was 12 until around I turned 18 I loved Android custom ROMs and I used to do my own modifications decompiling the framework APKs and modifying the XML layouts and monkey-patching smalis files so I did that, I reversed engineered the app and found the source of the data and… it worked! I was able to get the data and start working on the app!

The features I implemented were:

• A beautiful UI/UX design. I even hired a designer to help me with the design.
• Offline first approach. The app would work even if the user was offline.
• Customizable themes and colors
• Customizable layouts

In the end the app was a success, I won 1st place in the fair and the jury was impressed, the alumni loved it, they even wrote an article about the app in the university’s magazine.

I was happy with the resuls and the things I learned, like Flutter, UI/UX design, cache strategies, reverse engineering, public speaking and more.

Gallery

Presentation

This is the presentation I did for the fair, it’s in Spanish but you can get the gist of the app.