Services · Mobile app development · School apps
Codeeo offers school app development Boston schools can put in front of parents, students and staff: attendance, schedules, family messages, payments, permission slips and transportation updates in one app for iOS and Android. We build for charter, independent, parochial and district schools across the city, with FERPA, COPPA and the Massachusetts student records regulations treated as design requirements from the first workshop call.
Our team of 80+ works from Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi and has delivered 200+ projects across the UAE and the US. With Boston clients we run discovery, design reviews and sprint demos by video call, and nothing in the app depends on us being in the building.
200+ companies across the US and the UAEFrom a first store to a listed developer
What a Boston school app can include
A school in Dorchester, East Boston or Hyde Park often serves families who speak Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, Spanish, Vietnamese or Chinese at home, and whose children reach school on a yellow bus, on foot or on the T. A parent app that only works well in English, or only knows about one route to school, leaves out the people who most need it. We plan each feature around three questions: who receives this, in which language, and what must they do next. The list below is the set Boston schools ask for most, and we help you choose which belong in the first release and which can follow once staff are comfortable with the system. Every feature also gets a plain answer to who can see the data it creates.
Announcements, class notes and direct messages that reach each family in its preferred language, with human translation for templates you send every week and clear labelling where a machine translation is used. Replies come back into one inbox so a teacher or family liaison can answer without switching tools.
Families who do not read English still get the message on the day it matters.
Parents report an absence or late arrival from the app with a reason, and the front office sees it before morning attendance closes. Unexplained absences can trigger a same day alert to the family, with follow up logged against the student record.
Fewer morning phone calls and a cleaner attendance record.
Yellow bus stop times and delay alerts for younger students, alongside guidance for students in grades 7 to 12 who ride the T with an M7 pass, such as how to report a lost pass or what to do when a line is disrupted.
Parents know how their child is getting to school and what happens when the route fails.
A nor'easter can close a school overnight. Urgent alerts go out as push notifications, text messages and email at once, with a priority level that overrides quiet settings for genuine emergencies and a dashboard showing who has not yet opened them.
Closure news reaches every family before the first bus would have left.
Daily bell schedules, rotating blocks, early release days, parent conference slots and the school calendar in one view, synced from your student information system so the office is not keeping two versions.
One schedule everyone trusts.
Younger students may see homework, reading logs or a class feed, but apps used by children under 13 fall under COPPA. We keep student profiles minimal, switch off third party advertising and tracking SDKs, and rely on the school's authorization only for educational use, never for marketing. Older students get their own logins with features suited to high school, such as course schedules and counselor appointments.
Students get useful tools without the app collecting more than the school needs.
Field trip permissions, media consent, medication forms and annual updates signed on a phone, with reminders for anything outstanding and a record of who signed, when and which version.
No more chasing paper slips the week before a trip.
Lunch balances, trip fees, after school programs and uniform orders paid by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay through a PCI DSS compliant processor. The app never stores card numbers, and the finance office gets a reconciled export.
Payments collected without cash in envelopes.
Teachers take attendance, message families and see their class lists. Administrators manage roles, approve broadcasts, view delivery reports and audit who accessed which student record, with permissions set by role rather than by person.
Staff use one tool, and leaders can see that it is working.
The school nurse can send a confidential note to one family about a visit, a missed medication or an allergy plan, separate from general announcements. These messages sit behind stricter permissions, because health information held by a school is part of the education record and deserves the same care as grades.
Sensitive notes reach the right parent and nobody else.
Who this is for
Boston has district schools, Commonwealth charter schools, Catholic schools, independent day schools and a large community of education providers around them. Each answers to a different board and buys software differently. These are the situations we hear most, and how the first version usually differs between them.
Charter schools often run lean front offices and want one app to replace a patchwork of texting tools, paper forms and a separate payment site. We usually start with family messaging, attendance and forms, connected to your student information system, then add payments and transportation once the first term shows how families use it. For a Commonwealth charter, we also keep reporting simple, because your board and authorizer will want to see how families are being reached.
A narrow first release is easier for a small office to support.
Tuition based schools tend to want a branded app that feels like the school, with admissions events, athletics schedules, giving campaigns and alumni news next to the daily essentials. Because many families also have children at other schools, we keep logins simple and support several children under one parent account. Admissions and development offices often need their own roles, so we separate fundraising data from student records from the start. Parents can switch between children with one tap, and each child's teachers only see their own students.
If your family liaisons spend their mornings translating messages by hand, language support is the feature that pays back first. We design every screen to handle longer translated text, right to left scripts where needed, and audio messages for families who prefer listening to reading. Family liaisons can see which families have not opened a message and follow up by phone, which is often where the real outreach happens.
We test layouts with real translated copy, not placeholder text.
Vendors need a product that will pass district privacy review. We build data minimization, role based access, audit logs and deletion workflows into the product, and we help you document them so your team can complete a district data privacy agreement with confidence. If you plan to sell beyond Boston, we keep state specific settings configurable rather than hard coded.
How we work together
Most Boston schools start with a fixed scope first release, priced after discovery once we know your integrations, languages and number of user roles. After launch, a monthly retainer covers updates, operating system changes and new features through the school year. Networks and education companies with a longer roadmap can take a dedicated team that stays with the product. All three are run remotely by video call, with a named lead who answers your messages. Costs depend mainly on the number of roles, languages, integrations and how much of the admin side you need on day one.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
We use React Native or Flutter for the mobile apps, a web dashboard for staff, and cloud hosting in the US. Integrations typically include your student information system, Google Workspace for Education or Microsoft 365 sign in, and a payment processor. Hosting region, backup schedule and data retention are written into the scope so your privacy review has the answers it needs.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
It depends on scope, integrations and when you want to launch in the school year.
The biggest factors are how many user roles you need, whether we connect to your student information system and payment processor, and how many languages the app must support at launch. We agree a first release in discovery and set dates backward from a sensible launch point, often a term break, so staff are not learning a new system in the first week of school. You get the timeline in writing before design starts. A pilot with one grade before the full launch adds a little time but almost always saves more later.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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