Project field note
Laundry Notifications
An end-to-end laundry notifications feature for the Penn Mobile Android app: a UI toggle, a reboot-safe background polling architecture, push notifications, state persistence across reboots, and rate-limited API polling.
Built for Penn Labs, this is a full end-to-end laundry notifications feature in the Penn Mobile Android app. A user toggles notifications for a laundry machine and the app reliably tells them when their load is done.
The core challenge was reliability on Android. The feature uses a reboot-safe background polling architecture so scheduled checks survive device restarts, persists its state across reboots, and rate-limits API polling to stay within backend limits.
It ties together a settings UI toggle, background work scheduling, push notifications, and persistent state so the experience holds up even when the app is closed or the phone restarts.