UF Mobile App

Available on the App Store, opens in a new tab and Google Play, opens in a new tab

Overview

The UF Mobile App is the University of Florida's official app for iOS and Android. Students sign in with their university credentials to see their class schedule, finances, and action items. It replaced a vendor-provided app that was mostly webviews: web pages wrapped in an app, with little that felt native.

My Role

Lead Developer. Another developer and I built a proof of concept and a proposal to show that the university could build the app in-house. The university approved our proposal, and I led development from there, working with UX/UI designers and QA analysts to ship it. We built it with React Native and Expo, using native components instead of webviews.

Authentication was the hardest problem. No in-house app like this existed at UF yet, so there was no sign-in method to reuse. We worked closely with UF's identity and access management team and landed on OIDC, an industry-standard sign-in protocol, which that team had never implemented before. They handled the authentication itself, and we planned the flow with them so it would integrate with our backend.