Bringing every SRO championship into a single cross-platform app

Why SRO partnered with Si Novi

Si Novi was chosen for our record building fast, cloud-native applications on AWS, and for working closely with design teams. Many SRO series are already sponsored and powered by AWS, and SRO's existing content systems run in the same AWS estate, so fitting a new serverless application in alongside them was familiar ground. We took the app from concept to release with Whiteflame, across engineering, architecture, testing and deployment.

How we built it

One codebase, both app stores

The app is built with React Native through Expo, so a single codebase produces both the iOS and the Android version. We worked from Whiteflame's Figma designs, building them into a reusable component library so the two apps stay visually consistent and design and engineering could move in step. The interface is tuned to render without the jumps and reflows that make an app feel cheap, and to scale cleanly from small phones up to tablets. Because it runs on Expo, we can push updates to the JavaScript layer over the air, and the app checks for them both on launch and each time a fan reopens it, so a fix reaches people without waiting on an app-store review.

Built to keep working when the signal drops

Grandstands and paddocks are not known for their mobile coverage. Every screen reads through a two-tier cache - an in-memory layer over on-device file storage, indexed so a lookup is a single quick check rather than a scan - and falls back to the last data it holds whenever the connection is missing or a request fails. In practice the app keeps showing schedules, standings and team data whether or not there is a usable signal.

Race reminders each fan tunes themselves

A fan following British GT does not want alerts for a series on another continent. Each person chooses the championships they care about and how much warning they want before a session - an hour, fifteen minutes, five - and the app turns those choices into the exact set of notifications it subscribes them to. The same choices filter the content they see.

On the backend, every reminder for every upcoming session is worked out in advance and filed by the minute it needs to go out. Once a minute, a small job asks for everything due right now and sends it. That makes reminding a hundred thousand fans about a session start as cheap as reminding ten, and costs almost nothing between race weekends.

Sixteen feeds behind one clean app

Behind the app, a scheduled process reaches out across all of SRO's separate championship systems, normalises what comes back, and writes it into one store the app reads from cleanly. Each item is fingerprinted so unchanged data is left alone and only genuine changes are written, and anything removed upstream is cleared out. The app talks to one tidy, consistent feed instead of sixteen inconsistent ones.

Ready for race day

The whole backend is serverless, so it scales with demand and costs little when nothing is racing. In front of it sits a short cache: when thousands of fans refresh the standings within the same few seconds, they are served the same cached response instead of every request reaching the origin. Live video comes through the series' existing YouTube broadcasts, embedded in the app with the different-language commentary feeds, and the live timing screen brings in SRO's timing provider, so the heavy real-time work stays with the systems built for it.

Features at a glance

• Live video and replays (subject to region availability)
• Live session timing and status
• Detailed team and driver directories
• Event calendar with circuits, schedules and links
• News and video content across all GT World series
• Push reminders each fan sets per series and per session

The outcome

The app launched at Spa to strong early adoption, and gave SRO a single place for fans of every one of its championships, on either kind of phone. For SRO it is one digital home for a growing, international audience. For us it is a good example of taking a project with several moving parts - the rights holder, the design studio and a spread of upstream data systems - from architecture through to a release on both stores.

Who we are: Si Novi

Si Novi designs and builds secure, scalable applications and runs them for the long term. As AWS specialists and mobile app developers, we work with clients and their creative partners to take ambitious products from idea to release, across platforms and time zones.