Enhancing BPP’s learning platform for speed, scale, and engagement

BPP serves tens of thousands of students and the need for a seamless mobile experience is vital for students and educators alike. While the legacy app served as a critical tool for learners, there were opportunities to enhance usability, streamline performance, and expand functionality. Users occasionally experienced slower load times and latency, and the experience could be more intuitive to navigate.

In addition, the absence of built-in analytics made it challenging to gather insights into learner behaviour and feature usage. Maintaining separate native codebases for iOS and Android also added to the development team’s workload over time.

To modernise the platform, BPP partnered with YLD for their expertise in software engineering and React Native to rebuild the app and deliver a high-performing, user-centric solution. By switching to React Native, they now benefit from a unified codebase that runs on both iOS and Android platforms.

Through close collaboration with BPP’s team and leading engineering-driven discussions, we completely rebuilt the app along with the backend APIs, empowering their in-house team to take full ownership and easily manage future updates.

To ensure long-term scalability, we supported BPP in refining their product roadmap, helping them define the key engineering and design elements essential for their mobile app. Taking a consultative approach, we asked the right questions to uncover their priorities, enabling them to unify core mobile features and deliver a seamless learning experience.

Improved user communication, engagement, and system performance 

Legacy limitations around user communications created operational bottlenecks. The previous app lacked automated push notifications, which forced BPP to rely solely on manual emails. This manual approach was an inefficient process that placed unnecessary strain on internal teams and delayed critical user updates.

We introduced a centralised notification service integrating both email and push channels, starting with timetable changes and expanding to assignments, internal updates, and news. This system empowers all BPP teams to communicate efficiently, reduces manual overhead, and ensures timely, targeted delivery, boosting user engagement and enabling scalable, real-time communication across the platform.

Accelerated delivery and reduced engineering overhead 

Integrating a comprehensive development framework into the tech stack drastically simplified the implementation of native features like push notifications, haptics, splash screens, and camera access, which were capabilities that previously required days of complex setup and slowed delivery.

By leveraging Expo Application Services (EAS) and its Command-Line Interface (CLI), we streamlined app builds and app store submissions, enabling faster deployment cycles. We utilised Maestro to run automated tests on real app builds, which boosted confidence in code changes and made code reviews faster.

This setup significantly reduced engineering effort, shortened iteration cycles from days to minutes, and improved overall time-to-market, without sacrificing quality or flexibility.

Consistent UX across devices

To deliver a smoother, high-performance app experience across devices, we built on React Native with Expo, enabling native view compilation while leveraging BPP’s existing JavaScript and TypeScript skills. This approach reduced platform-specific complexity, accelerated development cycles, and ensured a consistent user experience. BPP is now also able to refer to the wider and dynamic React community for support. 

For more straightforward and efficient server-state management, we adopted TanStack Query, which is a robust library that simplifies data fetching, caching, and background synchronisation.

It offers an intuitive API with built-in support for automatic caching, pagination, retries, and background updates, helping streamline complex data workflows and reduce boilerplate. As a result, engineering teams gain back valuable time and app reliability improves across the board.

These decisions enabled BPP to scale faster, iterate confidently, and tap into the wider React ecosystem to future-proof their mobile strategy.

Achieved results with a pragmatic approach and a high-performing Agile team

Supporting our engineering team we added an Agile delivery manager who collaborated closely with the Product and Engineering teams, ensuring accurate forecasting of what’s achievable at every phase of developing the product. Through quarterly planning sessions and co-creating the roadmap with BPP, we ensured alignment across all teams.

Looking ahead

As user expectations evolve and BPP advances its strategic growth, our teams remain committed to ongoing collaboration. 

Guided by the product roadmap, we will continue refining the mobile app by integrating AI-driven functionality to deliver a more personalised and seamless user experience. This includes coaching services, intelligent study assistants, career guidance tools, and a responsive chatbot to address common enquiries, transforming the platform into a smarter, more adaptive learning ecosystem.