About
Almost everyone has to sit a written test at some point. Almost nobody enjoys studying for one.
Before anyone touches a steering wheel, they have to answer a few hundred questions about signs, speed limits, stopping distances and right of way. Before anyone becomes a citizen, there is another exam waiting — dates, institutions, rights, responsibilities. These are among the least glamorous milestones in a person's life, and they are also, for a lot of people, the ones that go wrong. Not because the material is hard, but because the way it is usually presented is unreadable, unstructured, and roughly four hundred pages long.
Movil Softwares Inc. is a mobile product studio in Toronto. We have spent years doing essentially one thing: taking an official study guide and turning it into a practice test that a person can actually finish. Twelve apps later, that is still the whole job description.
The tempting way to build in this category is to write one app, fill it with a general question bank, and sell it everywhere. It is cheaper, it scales beautifully, and it is quietly wrong. A roundabout in Dublin does not behave like a roundabout in Brisbane. A learner in Tasmania is not sitting the same paper as a learner in Saskatchewan. Give somebody an averaged-out answer and you have taught them a rule that will cost them the exam, or worse, something after it.
So each of our apps starts with the source material of a single test authority — the handbook, the sign set, the licence classes, the pass mark, the time limit — and stays there. When a rule changes, we change one app, and the people affected by that rule get the update. Nobody else's questions move.
A score tells you that you failed. An explanation tells you why. Only one of those helps on the second attempt.
Not time in app. Not streaks. The thing we care about is the sitting: whether someone who used the app walks out of a testing centre with the result they came for, ideally on the first try.
That changes a surprising number of decisions. Practice sets are short, because the honest amount of study time most people have is the length of a bus ride, not an evening. Every wrong answer gets a written explanation in the language of the official guide, not a paraphrase, so the wording feels familiar when it appears on the real paper. Mock exams run at the genuine pass mark and the genuine clock, because a practice test that is easier than the real one is a lie you tell someone right before they need the truth. And the whole question bank lives on the device, because the last place you want to discover you have no signal is the car park outside the testing centre.
We are a small team, which we treat as a constraint worth protecting rather than a stage to grow out of. It means the person who writes a feature is usually the person who answers for it, and there is nowhere for a bad decision to hide.
Technically we are pragmatic rather than religious. We build native when the platform is the product — offline storage, subscriptions, accessibility, the yearly OS migration — and we build cross-platform when a dozen apps need the same screen and it would be foolish to write it a dozen times. Swift, React Native and Flutter all ship here, and the argument about which one to use for a given surface is one we are happy to keep having.
Everything runs on real devices before it runs on anyone else's. Content gets reviewed against the current official publication rather than against last year's version of our own question bank, which is the quiet way these apps go stale.
The studio is at Brookfield Place on Bay Street in Toronto. The engineering team is remote and always has been — we overlap for a few hours a day and write the rest down, which turns out to be a reasonable description of how the work gets done regardless of where anyone sits.
Movil Softwares Inc. · Toronto, Canada · Publishing on the App Store