NLP Akadémia

A mobile podcast app for iOS and Android from one codebase, built in three days after the original supplier shut down. Monthly running cost is zero.

Where the problem was

NLP Akadémia runs a podcast and seminars, and had a mobile app to go with them. Not their own — an outside company ran it for them.

That company shut down. With it went access to the app, to its code and to any ability to change anything in it. The brand was left with an application it does not own, cannot update, and which will stop working at the first major operating-system update.

This is not a rare story. It is the most common way a company loses the software it paid for.

What was needed

Get them back to their own application. And do it without them waiting months for something to be built from scratch, and without their listeners noticing anything had changed.

What I did

I took the original application apart and worked out exactly what it did and how it behaved. Then I rebuilt it from scratch, in three days.

The new version is not a copy. It is the same thing, only better built and, above all, theirs. A listener opens the app, finds episodes and seminars in it, and listens. The app remembers where in an episode they stopped, and picks up exactly there when they return. It can switch off after a set time, so you can fall asleep listening without a flat battery in the morning.

Content is pulled automatically from the podcast feed. When the brand publishes a new episode, it appears in the app by itself and nobody has to do anything for it.

What it brought

The brand has an app it owns. The code, the accounts and the content are theirs, and nobody else holds them.

Running it costs nothing. The app has no server to look after. It keeps everything it needs on the phone and takes its content from the feed the brand publishes anyway. No monthly fee, nothing that can go down at midnight.

One codebase covers iOS and Android, so every change goes to both platforms at once.

Under the hood

React with TypeScript, wrapped with Capacitor into a native application for both platforms. The player is written by hand, not borrowed. It has a timer and remembers the position for each episode separately.

The feed is processed directly on the device with no intermediary, and it has fallback content ready in case the feed were unavailable. It never happens that a user sees a blank screen.

Deliberately without a backend. Any server here would be one more thing to pay for and watch over, and this app needs one for nothing.