Client background
Iva Technos is an embedded and cloud infrastructure company based in Coimbatore, India, with clients across the globe. Among their product portfolio is City Quest — a mobile application platform designed to transform urban exploration into interactive, educational experiences. City Quest allows users to discover cities through GPS-guided quests: structured journeys through neighbourhoods, historical districts, and cultural landmarks, where completing checkpoints unlocks stories, quizzes, multimedia content, and — in the gamified version of the product — rewards.
The concept positioned City Quest at the intersection of tourism, education, and urban engagement: a product that could be used by tourists exploring a new city, by schools running field trips, by city councils promoting local heritage, or by destination marketing organisations creating branded experiences. The underlying technology required was genuinely complex: GPS navigation at walking accuracy, real-time content delivery, interactive storytelling mechanics, push notifications, and a backend CMS sophisticated enough for non-technical content creators to build and manage quests without developer intervention.
The Iva Technos team had the domain expertise and the product vision, but needed a development partner with the right mobile engineering depth — specifically in React Native, GPS integration, and backend systems — to execute the build within budget and timeline constraints.
The challenge
The technical requirements for City Quest were demanding across multiple dimensions simultaneously. On the mobile side, GPS accuracy at walking pace is significantly harder than GPS accuracy in a moving vehicle: the application needed to detect when a user had arrived at a checkpoint within a 10-meter radius, work reliably in urban canyons where satellite signal quality is poor, and handle the GPS degradation that occurs in dense indoor environments. Poor GPS performance would directly degrade the core user experience.
Content management was an equally difficult problem. The quest content — stories, puzzles, multimedia elements, checkpoint coordinates, and interactive branching logic — needed to be manageable by content creators with no technical background. A developer-dependent CMS would be a bottleneck for the entire content creation pipeline and would make it impractical to scale the number of quests and cities on the platform. The CMS needed to be purpose-built for the City Quest content model: not a generic content management system adapted to the use case, but something designed specifically around the quest structure.
The gamification mechanics — the rewards programme that allowed users to accumulate points for completing quests and redeem them for partner offers — required a backend that could handle concurrent user actions reliably without creating race conditions in the points accounting. This was a distributed systems problem at a scale that required careful design.
Finally, the team needed to deliver a production-grade product — not a prototype — within a budget of under $50,000 and a timeline of six months. This required disciplined scope management and a development approach that prioritised the core user journey over feature completeness.
How we engaged
The engagement was managed by Saranya M., Project Manager at Iva Technos, working directly with the Squash Apps team. The collaboration structure reflected City Quest's co-founder, who was actively engaged throughout the build, and Srijith's direct involvement from the first day — something both the Co-Founder and Project Manager specifically highlighted in their reviews.
The Squash Apps team was sized at two to five engineers throughout the project, with the mix shifting by phase: user research and design occupied the first three weeks, followed by a parallel track of mobile development and CMS backend development, then an extended integration and testing phase in the final six weeks before launch.
A particularly important aspect of the engagement was the UX research phase. Rather than proceeding directly to design based on assumptions, the team conducted structured user research with a sample of potential City Quest users — tourists, school teachers, and local history enthusiasts — to validate the interaction model before building it. The findings influenced several significant design decisions, including the choice to use audio narration as the primary storytelling medium (rather than text, which users in walking contexts found difficult to read while moving) and the decision to make the checkpoint arrival detection deliberately forgiving (a 10-meter rather than a 5-meter radius) to reduce the frustration of users who were clearly at the right location but getting a miss result due to GPS inaccuracy.
What we built
The primary deliverable was the City Quest mobile application, published to both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The app included GPS-guided navigation to quest checkpoints, with a custom map component that displayed quest progress, remaining checkpoints, and the user's current location. The checkpoint detection used a combination of GPS coordinates, compass heading, and device motion to provide reliable arrival detection even in challenging urban signal environments.
The interactive storytelling system delivered each checkpoint's content through a structured experience: a location-triggered audio narration, followed by a visual story card, followed by an interactive element (quiz question, puzzle, or multimedia exploration). The branching logic — where different choices led to different content paths — was fully configurable through the CMS, allowing content creators to build quests of varying complexity without developer involvement.
The CMS was a web application built for non-technical content creators. Quest administrators could create quests by placing checkpoint pins on a map, attaching content packages (audio, images, story text, interactive elements) to each checkpoint, configuring the branching logic through a visual flow editor, and publishing quests to the app without any developer action. The media management system handled upload and transcoding of audio files, optimisation of images for mobile delivery, and content versioning.
The rewards programme backend tracked user points with ACID-compliant transactions to prevent double-counting, provided a redemption interface integrated with partner offer codes, and gave the City Quest team an admin dashboard for managing the partner reward catalogue.
Push notifications kept users engaged between sessions: quest completion congratulations, new quest announcements in cities the user had explored, and proximity-triggered notifications when a user was near the start of an available quest.
Technical approach
The mobile application was built in React Native, with Expo for device hardware integration (camera, GPS, compass, haptics) and React Navigation for the in-app navigation architecture. Map rendering used React Native Maps with a custom overlay layer for quest-specific UI. GPS accuracy was improved through a Kalman filter implementation that smoothed noisy position readings, reducing the false-positive checkpoint detection rate significantly compared to raw GPS position comparisons.
The backend API was built on Node.js with Express, backed by PostgreSQL on AWS RDS for structured data and AWS S3 for media storage. Audio files were transcoded to optimised formats on upload using a Lambda function triggered by S3 events, ensuring that mobile clients received appropriately compressed files regardless of the original upload quality.
The CMS frontend was a React application with a custom flow editor for the branching quest logic, built using React Flow — a library for building node-based UIs. The visual representation of branching paths was particularly important for content creators: making the logic visual rather than configuration-based dramatically reduced the learning curve and the number of content errors.
AWS CloudFront served all media assets with low latency to mobile clients, with cache control headers configured to minimise data usage for repeat visits to the same quest content.
Results
City Quest launched on schedule in August 2021. Within the first three months, the platform achieved a 45% increase in active users over the initial post-launch baseline — driven both by word of mouth among early adopters and by successful distribution through the first two city-specific marketing partnerships Iva Technos had established.
User retention — the percentage of users returning within 30 days of their first quest — improved by 35% compared to a benchmark the team had established from the beta testing cohort. This retention improvement was attributed primarily to the push notification system (which successfully re-engaged dormant users with personalised proximity triggers) and to the rewards programme (which gave users a reason to complete multiple quests to accumulate points).
The App Store and Google Play ratings settled at 4.7 stars, with reviews consistently praising the quality of the storytelling, the reliability of the GPS checkpoint detection, and the visual design of the app. The technical quality of the build held up in production: despite running on a wide range of Android devices with varying GPS hardware quality, the checkpoint detection false-positive rate was less than 2% across all sessions in the first three months.
City Quest demonstrates what well-executed GPS-based mobile app development can deliver at the intersection of education technology, tourism, and urban engagement. The combination of a purpose-built CMS, gamified rewards, and Kalman-filtered GPS accuracy produced a product that matched users' expectations from the first session — a key determinant of long-term retention in mobile applications where first-impression quality drives the review scores that govern discoverability. For organisations exploring GPS-guided experience apps, heritage trail products, or EdTech mobile platforms, this engagement is a detailed proof of concept.