Technical Architecture

The app is developed using MS Visual Studio with the Xamarin framework.

• Xamarin allows cross-platform development to build for Android/ iOS / Windows with a single code base.
• We’re used to Xamarin, having used it before for several other apps.
• (downside) Xamarin is on its way out (possibly) and the replacement is .Net Maui. At this early stage in the project we probably ought to start with Maui, but we’ve only dabbled with Maui so far (and hit some issues).

The app holds data in a SQLite database- this gives us a flexible data store to handle all the course and lesson data, user progress etc.

The app connects to a server for lesson content etc. This allows us to add or update course material at any time. When the app starts it connects to the server to query for updated data, and pulls the information for any updates down and stores them locally its own db. This connection is not particularly optimised at the moment, but in this development stage, we just need to make sure the data is there and up to date.

No user data is uploaded to the server at the moment, although we expect to add some usage analytics at some point.

In the development build we can connect to the apps local db from the server to inspect and or update the data in the app. This can be very useful when testing and debugging.