Project Name
Ksolves Cuts Upload Loss for an Android EdTech Platform
An education technology company builds an Android lecture-capture platform where instructors and students record, upload, and review classroom media, depending on large video and audio files reaching the cloud reliably even as users move between apps or lose signal. Every large recording had to survive an app switch, a locked screen, or a full process restart before it reached the cloud, and any one of those moments could silently break the upload, turning a lecture into a lost submission and a support ticket.
Ksolves brought Android application development expertise to the problem, building the upload pipeline around one governing principle: the transfer itself should never depend on which screen, if any, is currently open. All six possible upload states now have an explicit, tested recovery rule, and uploads survive backgrounding, screen recreation, and process restart without data loss.
- Large Uploads Broke When the App Left the Foreground: Long-running media transfers stopped whenever the app was backgrounded, the device locked, or the process was recreated, forcing users to restart large submissions from scratch.
- Progress State Was Tied to the Screen, Not the Upload: Because progress lived only in the UI layer, navigating away or rotating the screen could lose visibility into an upload already in flight.
- App Process Restarts Could Orphan In-Progress Work: When the process was killed and later recreated, uploads that were mid-transfer had no defined way to pick back up.
- Automatic Recovery Risked Overriding User Intent: A naive recovery pass could resume an upload the user had deliberately paused, undermining trust in the pause control itself.
- Service, Database, and UI State Could Drift Apart: With no single coordinating layer, the foreground service, the local database, and the UI could each report a different status for the same upload.
- Android's Background Execution Limits Threatened Long Transfers: Standard background restrictions meant any long-running upload needed an explicit, compliant execution model to avoid being killed mid-transfer.
Ksolves brought Android application development expertise to the problem, building the upload pipeline around a single governing principle: the transfer itself should never depend on which screen, if any, is currently open.
- Foreground Upload Service: A dedicated foreground service runs each transfer with a persistent notification, keeping it alive through backgrounding, screen locks, and the process limits the platform would otherwise enforce.
- Durable Room-Backed Upload Records: Each upload stores as a Room entity keyed by a unique ID, so file path, status, and progress survive screen recreation and process restart.
- Startup Recovery Policy: An application-startup routine queries Room for pending and in-progress uploads and resumes only the eligible ones, explicitly excluding anything the user paused.
- Repository-Coordinated Event Bus: UploadRepository centralizes persistence and transfer control, while a SharedFlow event bus broadcasts one consistent progress and status stream to every screen.
- Terminal-State Cleanup: Completed and removed uploads clear their cached progress immediately, so no stale status can reappear after navigation or restart.
Technology Stack
| Category | Technology |
|---|---|
| Architecture | MVVM + Repository Pattern |
| Processing | Android Foreground Service |
| Database | Room (SQLite) |
| Integration | AWS S3 TransferUtility |
| Platform | Kotlin SharedFlow |
- Recovery Defined for All 6 Upload States: Each of the six upload states, pending, uploading, paused, completed, interrupted, and removed, now has an explicit, tested recovery rule, replacing a process where an interrupted transfer could land in an undefined state with no consistent path forward.
- Uploads Survive All 3 Disruption Scenarios: Backgrounding, screen recreation, and process restart are all handled without data loss now, through foreground execution, Room persistence, and startup recovery working together.
- Zero Unintended Resumes on User-Paused Uploads: The recovery query explicitly excludes paused records, so no paused upload resumes without the user's own direct action.
- Fewer Repeated Submissions Expected: With persisted progress and rule-based recovery now in place, the team expects fewer repeat uploads and related support tickets, though this outcome is still pending confirmation against production metrics.
“The upload experience finally matches how our instructors actually use the app, recordings keep moving even when they’ve moved on to something else, and nothing resumes without their say.”
– Product Lead, EdTech
Large lecture uploads on this platform broke whenever the app left the foreground, the screen recreated, or the process restarted, forcing repeated submissions of files that could run long and heavy. Ksolves built a foreground service, Room persistence, and a rule-based recovery policy that keep every upload moving independent of screen or process lifecycle.
All six upload states now have defined recovery behavior, and paused uploads never auto-resume without the user’s own action. The architecture protects a core classroom workflow that instructors and students depend on for content actually being there when they need it.
The same repository and event-bus pattern now gives the platform a foundation for extending reliable background processing to other large-media workflows as the product grows.
Curious How a Foreground-Service Architecture Could Stop Your App’s Largest Transfers From Failing Mid-Flight?
