Currently, the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project include losing any native functionality of what we had planned for the phone app. Originally, we planned to build our user-facing app interface as a native Android app in Android Studio with Kotlin. However, after running into many difficulties with collaboration and build errors, we agreed to switch to developing a web application instead, with the same functionality as planned. However, the largest risk is losing any persistent functionality (including receiving notifications or receiving Bluetooth data when the web app is not active). To manage these risks, we are doing extensive research on the Web Bluetooth API, which allows us to communicate over Bluetooth using Javascript. Additionally, Android mobile devices do support mobile web push notifications. As a mitigation, should our team still run into any issues, we plan on creating a bare native Android application in Android Studio + Kotlin that handles any persistent native functionality such as notifications and Bluetooth communication and placing our web application as a WebView into the phone app so that the user may still interact with the interface we’ve built.
Changes were made to the existing design of the system, as discussed above. We’ve changed our user-facing application from a native Android app to a web application. This change was necessary due to persistent build (Gradle) errors and issues with collaboration in the Android Studio IDE. Costs this change incurs may involve a possible loss of native functionality (as discussed above), but these costs will be mitigated by the possibility of handling any bare native functions like notifications and Bluetooth through either the Web Bluetooth API + mobile web push notifications or a bare Kotlin app that handles these functionalities but displays our web application interface through a WebView.
No changes have been made to our schedule, but it can be viewed here.