Sensio trusted us with Safemate, a mobile app that 500+ seniors and their families rely on every day. Six years in production. Rebuilt from the ground up to a zero-incident standard. This page is how we did it.
In production since 2020 · 500+ daily users
Some software is different
Most apps can tolerate a bug. A crash means an annoyed user, a one-star review, a ticket in the backlog. Nobody gets hurt.
Then there is software where that math does not hold. A safety alarm that must reach a caregiver. A care platform that decides whether tonight's visit happens. An app where a missed alert is not a ticket, it is a person on the floor whose watch called no one.
We build for the second category. This is the story of six years of doing it.
In 2020, Sensio, one of Norway's leading welfare technology companies, brought us Safemate: a mobile app connecting seniors wearing safety devices with the family members who look after them. The app was live, it had real users, and it had real problems. It was built on an aging hybrid framework, complaints were coming in, and both Google and Apple had open compliance issues with it.
Sensio made the call that most companies avoid: instead of patching indefinitely, invest in doing it properly. They kept what worked, the product vision, the backend, the hardware, and trusted us with the rest.
Our job was to take an app that people already depended on and rebuild it underneath them, without dropping a single user on the way.
Rebuilding a live app is surgery on a patient who is awake. Users kept using Safemate every single day while we replaced what was underneath it. Here is what that took.
The rebuild
We retired the aging hybrid framework and rewrote Safemate as native apps for both Android and iOS. Not a port, a rewrite: new architecture, new codebase, built for the next six years instead of the last six. Existing users moved over without losing a thing.
The design
Together with Sensio's designer and product owner, the app got a completely new design: calmer, clearer, and built for the people who actually use it, seniors and the family members who check on them. Rebranded, restructured, and simplified without cutting capability.
The hard parts
Safemate connects to safety wearables and has to be right about hard things: real-time alerts that always arrive, live location that respects both battery and privacy, and geofencing that knows the difference between a walk in the yard and wandering out of it. This is where most of the engineering lives, and where cutting corners shows first.
The cleanup
We resolved every open compliance issue with Google and Apple and worked through the backlog of user complaints until the list was empty. Then we kept it empty. The app has been complaint-free in production since.
How we keep it running
On an app like Safemate, reliability is not a quality attribute, it is the thing itself. An alarm app that works most of the time is not an alarm app. So we run it to a simple discipline: measure everything, close every complaint, and treat every release like someone’s safety depends on it. Because it does.
Crash-free sessions
Verifiable in Play Console, updated with every release.
In production
Rebuilt in 2020, running and maintained by us ever since.
Unresolved complaints
Every report investigated until closed. The backlog stays empty.
What came of it
When we took over, Safemate had 140 daily users. Today it has more than 500, seniors and family members who open the app every single day. That growth did not come from marketing pushes. It came from an app that people stopped abandoning.
Along the way, Safemate reached the top 50 healthcare apps on the Norwegian App Store and grew beyond Norway: today it runs in Sweden, Denmark and Iceland as well. And it is still ours to run: monitored, maintained and improved, six years after Sensio first trusted us with it.
From the people who trusted us with it
We have worked with MagmaDev for some time as a subcontractor for app development, and our experience has been very positive. Communication has been excellent throughout the collaboration. We have also been very pleased with the quality of the code and the overall technical delivery. They understand requirements well, contribute constructively to discussions, and work as a true development partner rather than simply executing tasks.
Marius Bjønness
Product Owner, Sensio
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