A native study app with an AI tutor that knows the syllabus

The problem

Elite Achievers runs a study platform for Australian high school students. The web app worked, but students revise on their phones: on the bus, in a free period, often with patchy signal. A responsive website could not reach them properly. No push notifications, no offline access, no place on the home screen, no route into the app stores.

They also had something most education businesses do not: a large, well structured body of their own teaching material. Generic AI tutors gave students answers that contradicted how Elite Achievers actually teaches the subject, which is worse than giving no answer at all.

What we built

A native app for iPhone and Android from a single Expo codebase, on the same backend as the web platform, so a student’s progress is the same wherever they open it.

Athena, the AI tutor

Athena answers in natural language but retrieves from Elite Achievers’ own notes first, so explanations match the course rather than a generic model’s idea of the subject. Maths renders as typeset notation instead of broken plain text, which sounds minor and is the single thing that makes a maths tutor usable on a phone.

Recall

Spaced repetition flashcards built from the course material. The scheduler and the card store live on the device, so revision works on a train with no signal and syncs when it comes back. Offline was designed in from the start rather than retrofitted, and it shaped the data layer for the whole app.

Voice study rooms

Live audio rooms so students revise together, with presence, so you can see who is in a room before you join.

Library, Learn and syllabus tracking

Every note, past paper and resource in one searchable place. Course modules that stay in step with the web platform. A red, amber and green confidence tracker across the syllabus, so revision time goes where it is weakest.

An owner’s view in the same app

Admins get a screen of their own: what needs attention today, how active students are, what the AI tutor costs to run, and subscription numbers straight from Stripe. It opens on the one question an owner actually has, how are we doing, and lets the detail sit underneath it.

How we approached it

One codebase across both platforms, so features ship once and there is one app to maintain rather than two. The app follows the same product rules as the web app, so a student moving between laptop and phone never has to relearn anything.

The retrieval layer took the most care. A tutor that confidently contradicts your own teaching material damages trust in the whole product, so Athena is grounded in the Elite Achievers corpus and built to say when a question falls outside it.

Crash reporting went in before launch rather than after the first bad review.

The result

Elite Achievers went from a website students visited to an app on the home screen of the device they actually revise on. In both app stores, from one codebase, with a tutor that teaches their syllabus rather than a generic one.