$ cat ~/case-studies/uvu.md
Campus-wide student engagement app
The official student app for 40,000+ UVU students. Push notifications, class calendar, campus maps, SSO-authenticated student services, and real-time transit.
UVU had a patchwork of web portals that students were expected to juggle — registration, grades, transit, dining, campus alerts. The mandate: one app, SSO, zero friction for students who just want to know where their next class is and whether the shuttle is running.
React Native for reach (one codebase, two stores), AWS Amplify for the backend speed, Cognito federated through the university's Shibboleth identity provider so students could sign in with their existing credentials. Push notifications via Pinpoint for campus alerts and class-cancellation blasts.
The handoff was the differentiator. We paired with UVU's internal IT team for the last 3 weeks, pushed the AWS account and codebase to their org, and walked them through incident runbooks before we left. They now ship features on their own cadence.
- + kept: Shibboleth federation + university SSO- cut: Custom auth identity// why: Students already had credentials; rebuilding identity was pure friction.
- + kept: Native feel via React Native Reanimated- cut: Fully native dual-codebase// why: Budget bought more features than two separate apps would have.
- + kept: Owned-account AWS handoff- cut: "Managed service" retainer// why: UVU IT is capable. A managed-service tax would have insulted them — and lost the engagement.
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