The context
Nydus Systems has been building HR software since 1990. The platform covers payroll, benefits, recruiting, workplace health and safety — and time tracking, which is where mobile comes in.
Two products, with very different constraints:
- The employee app, used on a personal phone to check payslips, income statements and timesheets, and to clock in
- The kiosk, a tablet fixed to the wall at the workplace, where clocking in happens by face recognition
The kiosk problem
Face recognition on shared hardware has two requirements that fight each other.
It has to be fast, because the queue forms all at once — nobody wants to wait for a camera to warm up before starting a shift. And it has to work when the connection drops, because a time record is a legal document and cannot pause when the office link flickers.
The symptoms were specific, and all traced to one place: it froze returning to the clock-in screen after a punch; froze again after registering an employee's photo; on a newly set-up device the camera took far too long to start — sometimes not at all, forcing the operator to switch methods and come back; and switching between clock-in methods was slow.
What we did
Offline face recognition, so clocking in does not depend on connectivity.
Rebuilt the camera architecture, which was the shared cause of all four freezes — the camera lifecycle was being torn down and recreated on every screen entry and exit.
Alongside that, the work a time-tracking product needs to be taken seriously:
- Geolocation on each punch, including how the app behaves when the API is unreachable
- Digital badge and digital identity in the app
- A systematic crash hunt through Crashlytics, item by item —
CameraController,RenderBox, the PDF viewer - Android and iOS pipelines fixed so the map renders in production
- Self-service record updates from the app, approved by HR: personal details, dependants and address
That last one is in the release notes published on 25 September 2026 — it can be checked on the store listing.
The result
NydusRH Mobile holds 4.9 stars across 448 Google Play ratings, with over 10,000 downloads and a release shipped in September 2026.
For a corporate app — software people are required to use in order to get paid — 4.9 is a hard number to reach. HR apps usually live in the low threes, because they get rated by people who are already annoyed.