Jalsa Salana Australia

The convention already had an app, but it needed a signal to show anything. With thousands of people on one patch of reception, that often meant a spinner and then an error, right when someone was looking for the next session or where to park. Announcements weren't reliably reaching phones either.

The new one had to be in both stores, tested and working well before the first day, with no room to slip.

Sixteen screens covering everything an attendee needs over the three days:

• What's on now and what's next, right on the home screen, with a countdown in the weeks before.
• The full programme for every day, from the early morning prayers to the last evening session.
• Directions, parking maps you can zoom into, transport, and nearby accommodation.
• Announcements the Jalsa team sends from inside the app, delivered as notifications and kept for later.
• Live streams of the sessions for anyone who can't be there.
• One-tap calls to the Jalsa team, the medical facility, lost and found and the book stall.
• Light and dark mode.

Being offline was the normal case here, not the edge case. The programme, maps, directions and phone numbers ship inside the app and are saved on the phone, so they open instantly with or without a connection.

When there is a connection, the app quietly checks for anything newer and swaps it in. If a session moves or a number changes mid-event, the team updates it once and it reaches everyone's phone without waiting on an App Store review.

Urdu is written right to left in Nastaliq, a script plenty of apps get wrong. Instead of flipping the whole layout when the language changes, the app keeps buttons and menus where people expect them and sets the Urdu text right-aligned in a typeface made for it. Switching languages is instant, with no restart, and you can do it at any point.

Attendees don't make an account or hand over any personal details. The only thing the app sends back is anonymous crash reports, so we can fix problems quickly.