Midan Studio is an ad studio in central Cairo. They have 22 employees, most of them working from shoot locations — not the office. Their problem: attendance was still logged on paper.
Why an app, not Excel?
The office manager collected paper attendance sheets at the end of every month, typed them into Excel by hand, and sent the timesheets to accounting. Three lost workdays every month. They suggested a mobile Excel app — we said no. Reason: staff won't stick with a complicated form.
Rule: any form that needs more than 3 taps won't be used consistently.
App design: 3 taps maximum
Each screen does exactly one thing. Check-in: one tap. Leave request: two taps. Monthly report: one tap. That discipline is what made the app actually get used.
The real challenge: working offline
Shoot locations often lack good 4G coverage. The app has to keep working fully offline and sync once the network comes back.
We used a Room database with a sync queue, so the app records everything locally and pushes to the server automatically when a connection is available. The employee does nothing — they don't even know the feature is there.
Encryption: no shortcuts
- All local data encrypted with SQLCipher
- Server communication over TLS 1.3 only
- Keys stored in Android Keystore
- No Google Drive backup, to preserve privacy
Results after one year
- +18,000 downloads across the team and their clients
- 4.6 rating on Play Store
- 3 workdays saved every month
- Zero payroll delays caused by attendance errors
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