The context
A consumer tablet designed for seniors: simplified interface, large buttons, no jargon anywhere. The device ships with a bundle of preinstalled applications, and those applications have to last — someone who buys this kind of hardware keeps it for years and has no appetite for a home screen that changes every six months.
Three of those applications were entrusted to us: a video player, access to an audiovisual archive collection, and a podcast application.
The challenge
The real problem was never shipping a first version. It was lasting.
An application preinstalled on a device sold in shops cannot afford to break.
Every Android release moves something: restrictions on BroadcastReceiver,
background task rules, permissions, storage behaviour. Every change in the
upstream content sources moves something else. And the target audience is
precisely the one least likely to work around a bug.
What we did
We built the three applications, then supported them year after year:
- Tracking Android version upgrades, through to Android 14 — adapting
BroadcastReceiverusage, service lifecycles and permission policies. - Making image loading reliable in scrolling lists. The classic symptoms — wrong thumbnail on a recycled row, first images never appearing, rate limiting from the remote server — were fixed at the root: a controlled request queue, debouncing, target verification before display, and a unified HTTP client.
- Adapting to changes in content sources, which alter their format or access policy without warning.
Around these applications, we worked on a wider ecosystem: content collection and redistribution services, connected-TV applications, casting to a television set, and a real-time video-calling component.
The outcome
All three applications are still in production today, eight years after the first deliveries, on a fleet of devices in the hands of users who have never seen them fail.
This is the kind of engagement that makes no noise — and for that exact reason says the essential thing: a supplier you keep for eight years is a supplier whose code never had to be rewritten.