MDE Hub — field reporting & site safety app for MDE Installations

MDE Hub is a native Android app and web portal built for the field engineers at MDE Installations. Working with ESB in the Irish energy sector, engineers use MDE Hub on-site to log safety-related events — Good Catch and Near Miss reports, accident and incident reports, revenue-protection cases, witness statements and vehicle incidents — and to capture the video and photo evidence that goes with them. Back-office administrators review everything through the web portal at mdeinstallationsapp.com.

App download: MDE Hub Android v1.21

The challenge

Field safety reporting historically means paperwork, phone photos, WhatsApp messages and delayed data. Build a rugged, field-friendly Android app that lets engineers log a Good Catch, capture a barcode-scanned meter identifier, record a video walk-around and file an incident report in seconds — reliably, with evidence attached, even when signal is poor — and get all of it into a central portal the office can act on the same day.

What we built

• Native Android app for field engineers with secure sign-in and role-appropriate workflows
• Barcode & QR scanning for meter identification, with instant validity check and capture-video shortcut
• Reports dashboard — every submission organised by date, video-linked, searchable
• Structured safety-report forms — Good Catch / Near Miss, Accident / Incident, revenue-protection, witness statement, vehicle incident, additional meter read — with ESB-specific fields (MPRN, S.O. Number, Planner Group / Dispatch Area, SWF Job Number)
• Photo & video evidence captured in-app and uploaded to central storage, with a pending-videos queue for weak-signal sites
• Django web portal at mdeinstallationsapp.com for administrators — evidence review, account management, reporting
• Full auth lifecycle — sign-up, login, forgot-password, change-password across app and portal

Technology stack

• Mobile: native Android (Java), targeting Android 7.0 (API 24) through Android 15 (API 35)
• On-device storage: Realm mobile database for offline-first persistence
• Networking: Retrofit 3, OkHttp, GSON
• Reactive: RxJava 2 / RxAndroid
• Media: Glide (images), ExoPlayer (video playback), background upload with retry
• Scanning: camera-based QR & barcode scanner
• Observability: Firebase Crashlytics and Analytics (Advertising-ID collection explicitly disabled)
• Web portal: Django, Python 3.8, WSGI, on AWS EC2 (eu-west-2)
• Storage: AWS S3 (eu-west-1) for photo & video evidence
• Distribution: signed APK hosted directly for controlled internal rollout
• Techniques: offline-first data capture, background job queueing, per-ABI native library builds (arm64, armv7, x86, x86_64), Android 11+ package-visibility hardening

Screenshots