University Super App

Overview

A multi-tenant university mobile app built on Flutter and Firebase. Supports four user roles (students, teachers, parents, staff) with role-based dashboards, offline-first reads, and per-university configuration so a single codebase serves multiple institutions with their own branding, modules, and access policies.

Problem

Universities each want their own app, but most can't afford to build and maintain one. Off-the-shelf vendors charge per-seat and lock everything down. The team needed a single codebase that could serve multiple universities cheaply, with each tenant feeling native to its institution.

Approach

Treat every university as an isolated tenant. Load tenant configuration at app boot: branding, theme, enabled modules, role hierarchies, integrations. Use clean architecture so the domain layer doesn't know it's multi-tenant; only the infrastructure layer does. Cache aggressively for offline support since student campuses have spotty WiFi.

Architecture

• Framework: Flutter 3.41+ with Dart.
• State management: Riverpod, scoped per-feature.
• Routing: GoRouter with role-aware route guards.
• Backend: Firebase (Auth, Firestore, Storage, Cloud Messaging, Analytics, Crashlytics).
• Offline storage: Hive for cached reads with conflict-aware sync on reconnect.
• Architecture: Clean architecture pattern, domain-driven feature folders.

Tech stack

• Flutter 3.41+, Dart
• Firebase (Auth, Firestore, Storage, FCM, Analytics, Crashlytics)
• Riverpod (state), GoRouter (navigation)
• Hive (offline storage)

Engineering highlights

• Role-based dashboards: student, teacher, parent, staff each see a different home screen tied to their permissions and current academic context.
• Offline-first reads: Hive caches every read; the UI never blocks on the network.
• Per-tenant config at boot: branding, theme, enabled modules, and role hierarchies all loaded from a tenant config doc.
• Clean architecture: domain layer is multi-tenant-blind, infrastructure layer handles isolation.
• Modules: academics (grades, schedule, courses), campus (map, services), communication (announcements, messaging), documents (forms, transcripts).

Status

Production-ready prototype, awaiting institutional pilot.