Dingaan Letjane
16 February 2023
UniAPS stands for university admission point score, initially, the application’s core business process was to calculate Admission Score Points for South African universities. A few weeks after the app was released, I was already working on implementing a new feature where the app will be able to generate a list of courses prospective students qualify for by just entering their results.
Why did I develop UniAPS?
Back in 2019 during my first year of studying, I joined the “NSFAS Updates” Facebook page. Around April I saw a lot of matric learners asking for help with applying to universities and calculating their admission point scores. I then commented on this post in that I’m willing to help, and I got multiple replies on my comment asking me to help them.
The process wasn’t easy. A lot of matric learners asked for help in specifically identifying courses they qualify for. I had to page through the TUT prospectus and look at other universities’ prospectus to help matric learners find out. It was very time-consuming.
Early in 2020, I thought about the UniAPS idea. I was spending so much time looking through the university prospectus, why shouldn’t I try to develop an app that will automatically generate a list of courses learners qualify for based on their admission point score? By then I was a second-year student, and I didn’t know much about mobile app development.
What can UniAPS do?
UniAPS helps learners to find courses and universities to apply to by matching their admission point scores to those courses. Often prospective students apply for courses without taking the minimum requirements into account, which leads to rejections. UniAPS can help limit the number of rejections from universities and save time.
Technologies I used to develop UniAPS
- Flutter – Flutter is an open-source framework developed by Google that lets you build natively compiled, multiplatform applications from a single codebase. I used this approach because I really wanted to have an android and iOS version of UniAPS and using Flutter for app development is reasonably easy and fast.
- Firebase – Firebase is a Backend-as-a-Service that provides developers with a variety of tools and services to help them develop quality apps and grow their user base. UniAPS uses most of Firebase services such as Authentication to authenticate users through social media sign-ins and user management on the backend, Cloud Firestore to save the user’s information, course requirements and universities, and the Remote Config service to make changes to the app without having to update the app.
- Onesignal – Onesignal is a push notification service. I implemented this to engage with UniAPS end users to push updates about courses, bursaries and late applications.
UniAPS is available for download on the Play Store, App Store, and App Gallery.
Enterprise App Development at Integrove
Dingaan Letjane is a junior software developer at Integrove. We encourage all of our employees to be self-starters and enable them to start projects of their own. If you’d like to start your tech journey with us, check out our current vacancies!