Load-Shedding Schedule and Outage Alerts with Home Screen Widgets
An iPhone app that tells people when their power will go and come back: feeder schedules shown in widgets and Live Activities, reminders before each scheduled cut, and crowdsourced reports of unscheduled outages. The engineering is in making alerts and widgets correct while the power and the internet are both down, within iOS background limits.
Intermediate
A small team, or one strong student willing to learn something new.1 semester, 2 students
6 to ship
3 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- Feeder or area selection and a schedule view that works fully offline from locally stored data
- Home screen and lock screen widgets showing the next outage and restoration time
- Local notifications before each scheduled cut, planned within the system limit on pending notifications
- A Live Activity counting down to the expected restoration time
- Crowdsourced "power off" and "power back" reports with a simple trust score per area, backed by a small API
- A test plan covering airplane mode, time zone and clock changes, and an out-of-date schedule
If you have time left
- Parse schedules published as images or PDFs with on-device text recognition
- Push notifications for unscheduled outages confirmed by several reports in the same area
- An accessibility pass verified with VoiceOver and the largest Dynamic Type size
The problem
In much of Pakistan and South Asia, scheduled load-shedding is part of daily life, and unscheduled outages come on top. Schedules are published per feeder by distribution companies in formats that change without warning, and when the power goes the home router and often the mobile signal go with it. People plan study, work and cooking around outages with screenshots and guesswork.
What you build
A SwiftUI app that stores the schedule for the user's area on the device, surfaces the next cut and restoration time in widgets and a Live Activity, schedules reminders ahead of each cut, and lets users report unscheduled outages so others in the same area know it is not just their house.
The technical problem that is harder than it looks
Everything must be correct offline and without the app running. iOS limits how many local notifications can be pending, widgets refresh on a budget the system controls, and background work is not guaranteed. The core work is planning notifications and widget timelines ahead of time from local data, and degrading honestly when the schedule may be stale.
The design decision to defend
Trust in crowdsourced reports. One report proves nothing and a wrong alert erodes trust fast. Decide how many reports, from how many devices, over what time window, confirm an outage, and show users how confident the app is.
Privacy
Map users to an area, not to a precise location, and never store raw GPS traces. Reports should not be linkable to a person.
Scope warning
Do not try to cover every distribution company. One city or one company, with schedules entered or imported for a set of feeders, done reliably, is the project.
Ideas and guidance, not finished projects
These are project ideas and scoping guidance, published free for students to use as a starting point. I do not build, write, or sell final-year projects, and I do not complete coursework for anyone. Take an idea, make it yours, and build it.
Not sure this one fits you?
I help students pick an idea that matches their skills and their deadline, then scope it down until it is finishable. Guidance only, never done for you.
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