Product · Case study
Skolo
Know your child is safe. Every trip.
Real-time school van tracking that connects parents, schools, and drivers in one app — with verified handoff at both ends of the journey.
Looking for the product itself? Skolo has its own site with features, pricing, and sign-up. This page is about how we built it — the engineering problems behind the product, and what they say about the work we can do for you.
Go to skolo.astriagk.comThe problem we set out to solve
The school commute is a daily blind spot. Parents have no idea whether the van is five minutes away or thirty, so they call the driver — who is driving. Schools cannot answer for a fleet they cannot see. And the moment that matters most, a child being handed over, has no record at all: everyone simply assumes it went to the right adult.
Skolo puts live vehicle position, arrival estimates, and handoff verification in one app with three role-based experiences. Parents track the van and get notified before it reaches them. Schools see the whole fleet and the compliance trail. Drivers get navigation and a way to communicate without touching a phone call.
Engineering
Four problems that were harder than they look
Every one of these is the kind of detail that decides whether a tracking product gets trusted or uninstalled.
Location without draining the battery
A tracker is useless if parents force-quit it to save power. Position updates are sampled against movement and trip state rather than on a fixed timer, so the van reports frequently while in motion and goes quiet when parked.
Notifications that fire once, at the right moment
A 500m proximity alert sounds simple until the vehicle idles at a junction just outside the boundary and re-triggers repeatedly. Geofence transitions are debounced and tracked per trip so each family gets exactly one approach notification.
Handoff as an auditable event
OTP verification turns pickup and drop-off from an assumption into a recorded fact, which is what makes the data useful to a school during a compliance review rather than only reassuring to a parent in the moment.
One product, three audiences
Parent, school, and driver experiences differ in almost every screen but share a data model and a release cycle. Role-based access and tenant isolation were designed in from the start, because retrofitting them into a live tracking product is not realistic.
Capabilities
What the product does
Covered in full on the Skolo site — summarised here for context.
Live GPS tracking
Continuous vehicle position on a live map, powered by TomTom's enterprise mapping and routing stack.
Proximity notifications
Push alerts fire at a 500m approach, at pickup, and at drop-off — so nobody waits at the gate guessing, and nobody calls the driver mid-route.
OTP-verified handoff
A one-time code confirms each child was collected by the right adult, turning the least-visible moment of the trip into an auditable record.
Three roles, one platform
Parents get tracking and alerts, schools get fleet dashboards and compliance reporting, drivers get navigation and comms — from a single codebase.
Route history and ETAs
Completed trips are retained with timings, so a question about last Tuesday has an answer rather than a recollection.
Family access sharing
More than one guardian can follow the same child's commute, without sharing a login.
Why it matters to you
What this project proves we can do
- Real-time location ingestion and mapping
- Geofenced push notification pipelines
- Multi-tenant, role-based product architecture
- Cross-platform mobile delivery
If your product involves live location, fleets, or several audiences sharing one platform, this is the work most like yours.
See our mobile app serviceNeed something tracked, in real time?
Fleets, deliveries, field teams — the architecture behind Skolo transfers directly. Tell us what you are building.