2023
edX Mobile App Rewrite
A ground-up rewrite of the edX mobile apps, shipped across iOS and Android without disrupting millions of active learners.
I led the product side of rebuilding edX’s iOS and Android apps: scoping the MVP, aligning teams across three organizations, and steering a high-stakes launch that kept reliability rock-solid.
Role
Product lead
Teams
3 orgs, 1 roadmap
Reliability
99%+ crash-free
The Challenge
A platform learners trusted, on architecture that couldn’t carry the future
The edX mobile apps were stable and serving learners at scale. But the architecture underneath had hit its limit: it was getting harder to build the experiences we wanted, and harder for internal teams and the Open edX community to contribute.
This was never a rescue mission for a broken app. As a major contributor to the Open edX ecosystem, edX had a chance to move onto a modern native foundation that both edX.org learners and the wider community could build on for years.
Rebuild everything on a modern foundation, while preserving the reliability, quality, and learner trust the existing apps had already earned.
Approach
Ruthless scope, one roadmap, many teams
I owned the product side end to end, scope definition, roadmap, delivery coordination, launch planning, and stakeholder communication.
We anchored on an MVP at ~80% feature parity with production, making explicit calls on what had to ship at launch versus what could follow. Every decision was weighed against timeline, learner impact, and the risk of disrupting familiar behavior.
- Aligned three organizations, edX.org mobile, TouchApp Media, and Open edX contributors (Racoon Gang, Schema Education), around a single roadmap and shared ways of working
- Set up cross-team planning, async updates, internal and community demos, decision logs, and clear blocker escalation
- Partnered with design and engineering so the apps weren’t just modern under the hood, but meaningfully better for learners
- Worked with branding and UX on store presence, preview assets, and the “What’s New” moment, so it landed as a product release, not a migration
What made it complex
Not a rewrite, a multi-team product transformation
01
Coordination without authority
Internal teams, external partners, and community contributors, each with different ownership models and working styles. My job was to align priorities and keep everyone moving together toward one launch.
02
Holding the line on scope
A rewrite invites an endless wish list. We made disciplined trade-offs across parity, learner experience, accessibility, in-app purchases, analytics, and release readiness, ambitious enough to justify the rewrite, focused enough to ship.
03
Launching without regressions
The quality bar was already high, so success wasn’t about fixing broken metrics. It meant shipping a fully rebuilt app while preserving engagement and reliability across a large global learner base.
Outcome
A modern app, shipped without breaking trust
The new apps launched on iOS and Android, built with SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, bringing a redesigned Learn tab, improved Course Home, clearer Dates, better Discussions, refreshed branding, and Dark Mode.
Most importantly, the rebuild held edX’s reliability bar through the transition, and store ratings improved as learners responded to the new experience.
~99%+
Crash-free stability, carried through the transition
iOS + Android
Rebuilt natively, in parallel
80%
Feature parity targeted for the MVP
Higher
App Store & Play Store ratings after launch
A defining example of leading through ambiguity, bringing product, engineering, design, QA, branding, and community together to ship a high-stakes rewrite without compromising learner trust.