Transporte DET
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A real-time transportation app for CODELCO El Teniente workers, offering live bus tracking, arrival estimates, and interactive route planning using Flutter and Mapbox.
Transporte DET is a mobile application developed for Android and iOS, designed specifically for the workers of CODELCO’s El Teniente division. Created at Transapp, the app ensures that employees have access to all the necessary tools to plan and execute their daily commutes effectively within the mining zone.
How It Works
Every user logs in securely through CODELCO’s Azure Single Sign-On system, allowing for a seamless and enterprise-grade authentication experience. Once logged in, users can personalize their experience by saving their nearest bus stop and the specific bus service they regularly use to get to work. The app then provides real-time notifications when the selected bus is approaching their saved stop, giving workers peace of mind and helping them plan ahead.
A dynamic map displays all nearby bus stops along with live information about each vehicle. Users can see real-time and scheduled arrival predictions for every stop, including estimated time of arrival and current bus capacity. This allows workers to choose the most convenient and least crowded option before leaving for their commute. The combination of real-time updates and user-specific preferences turns Transporte DET into a reliable and intuitive daily companion.
Challenges
Integrating Azure SSO for login required aligning the app’s authentication flow with enterprise-level identity systems. Ensuring a smooth and secure sign-in experience while maintaining compatibility with Flutter’s ecosystem was a key technical challenge.
Implementing real-time push notifications for bus arrivals involved creating a system that could interpret live vehicle data, match it with each user’s saved stop and service, and send timely alerts without overwhelming the user.
Working with GTFS data on a daily basis to provide up-to-date scheduled predictions required building a process to ingest, transform, and display information alongside real-time feeds. Ensuring consistency between planned schedules and actual bus positions — while clearly communicating both to the user — added complexity to the prediction logic and UI design.
Designing an application for around 3,000 daily users required a strong focus on performance, reliability, and scalability. One of the key challenges was maintaining a smooth and responsive experience across a wide range of Android and iOS devices, especially in a mission-critical context where users depend on the app to get to work on time.
Key Learnings
This project strengthened my ability to use Flutter to deliver a consistent user experience across both Android and iOS, taking full advantage of the framework’s cross-platform capabilities while maintaining native performance and responsiveness.
I gained hands-on experience with Firebase Cloud Messaging, learning how to manage device tokens, handle background messages, and implement a reliable notification system tailored to individual user preferences.
Additionally, I learned to work with Mapbox to create a dynamic and informative UI, integrating real-time map elements such as moving buses, live predictions, and stop markers in a way that was both efficient and intuitive for users navigating their daily commutes.
Tech Stack
The application was built with Flutter, ensuring a unified and consistent experience across Android and iOS devices. Firebase was used for authentication, real-time data handling, and push notifications through Firebase Cloud Messaging.
Azure Active Directory provided enterprise-level Single Sign-On integration for secure user access. Mapbox powered the interactive map interface, enabling real-time tracking of buses, stop visualization, and predictive route information.
The app follows a Clean Architecture approach, with clear separation between domain, application, infrastructure, and presentation layers, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and testability across all modules.
Conclusion
Transporte DET was a valuable opportunity to build a robust, user-focused transportation app tailored to the specific needs of CODELCO’s El Teniente workforce. The project brought together real-time data, enterprise authentication, and intuitive UI design to deliver a seamless commuting experience.
It allowed me to apply Flutter effectively across platforms, implement personalized cloud-based notifications, and create interactive, data-rich interfaces using Mapbox. One of the most meaningful aspects of the project was ensuring a high level of quality and performance for a real user base of around 3,000 people who rely on the app daily. This required thoughtful decisions around architecture, data handling, and UI responsiveness to guarantee that the app remained reliable, fast, and useful — even in demanding operational environments.
More importantly, it reinforced the importance of designing with both reliability and user context in mind — especially in environments where timing, trust, and accessibility are critical.
