Custom apps for the aviation sector, built for crew, ground handling, cargo, MRO and operations control. We don't build safety-critical avionics, but we do build the operational and administrative layer that runs above, alongside and below the aircraft. Offline-first, robust and built to meet the requirements that aviation places on software.
An aviation app is any mobile or tablet application used by employees, partners or customers in the aviation industry. This ranges from an Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) on the iPad in the cockpit, to a crew rostering app for cabin crew, to a turnaround tool that helps ground staff get an aircraft airborne within its slot. Such an app is almost always part of a larger ecosystem, integrated with the operational systems of the carrier, handler or MRO.
At Appfront, we build aviation apps for the operational and administrative layer. That means rosters, manuals, defect reporting, ULD tracking, e-AWB, crew communication, training checklists, and audit and compliance workflows. What we explicitly do not do is safety-critical avionics under DO-178C or DO-254. Those require specialised avionics firms working under a different certification regime. We work on the layer around that, where standard mobile technology is the norm and the market is still full of spreadsheets, paper and outdated enterprise software from the large vendors.
The Dutch aviation sector is internationally oriented, heavily regulated and mission-critical. An aviation app is therefore not just about good design. It is about uptime, working without a network connection, auditable data, and an interface that works with gloves on, on a platform in the rain. That is what we build for.
The users are diverse: airlines such as KLM and Transavia for market context, regional airlines such as KLM Cityhopper, ground handlers such as Swissport, KLM Equipment Services and Menzies, cargo handlers such as KLM Cargo, Air France Cargo and dnata, airports such as Schiphol, Eindhoven and Rotterdam The Hague Airport, air traffic control at LVNL, MRO companies such as KLM E&M and Fokker Services, air charter and private aviation, drone and UAV operators, training organisations such as CAE and the KLM Flight Academy, and aerospace OEMs such as Fokker and GKN Aerospace. Plus flight schools and gliding clubs. What they share is the physical reality of aviation, and a software stack that has to adapt to it, not the other way round.
You are a niche provider for which no commercial product exists, for example a specialised charter operator, gliding club, or UAV company with its own way of working that does not fit an out-of-the-box suite.
The value lies in deep integration between flight planning, crew management, dispatch, maintenance and finance. A standard app cannot look across those boundaries; custom development can.
Suites from Sabre, Amadeus, IBS Software or Lufthansa Systems are designed for the major carriers. For mid-market regional airlines, handlers or MROs, that is both financially and operationally excessive.
Ground handlers and cargo handlers often serve dozens of airlines at once. A white-label aviation app with client-specific branding, configuration and data isolation is effectively a commercial product in its own right.
A platform at Schiphol-Oost, an aircraft over the Atlantic, a steel MRO hangar: connectivity is unreliable. That is why we build with a local data store (Realm, WatermelonDB or SQLite) and synchronise once the network returns. CRDTs and conflict resolution are part of the architecture from sprint one.
EASA, CAA-NL, Part-145, Part-M, Part-CAMO, IATA, ICAO, ONE Record: every aviation app touches at least two of these frameworks. We model audit trails, role-based access, retention and Just Culture safety reporting as if the inspector is arriving tomorrow, because they might well be.
An app that crashes during a turnaround costs money, slot time and sometimes a flight. We build for uptime, graceful degradation and clear error messages, not for the demo. Releases go out via canary deploys, and rollback is always a single command.
An overview of the kinds of applications we have built, or are well suited to build, for airlines, regional carriers, handlers, cargo operators, MROs and training organisations.
Rosters, briefings, manuals, fatigue tracking and flight plans for cockpit and cabin crew.
Electronic Flight Bag functionality alongside or in place of ForeFlight and Jeppesen.
Turnaround management, GSE tracking and apron coordination.
ULD tracking, e-AWB, ONE Record integration and warehouse flows.
Defect reporting, parts lookup, AD/SB tracking under Part-145.
Operations Control Centre views for disruption management.
Flight planning for UAV operators with integration to LVNL.
Theory, checklists and flight-time logs for flight schools and CAE-style programmes.
Safety reporting (ASRS-style), Just Culture and audit workflows.
Tankering decisions, fuel orders and consumption analysis.
Boarding, lounge and flight information: less typical, but entirely possible.
One product, many airlines, for ground and cargo handlers.
Aviation is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the world. Software that touches operations almost always falls under an audit regime. Within Europe, EASA is the overarching framework, supplemented in the Netherlands by the CAA-NL. For maintenance, EASA Part-145 is the governing standard, with Part-M and Part-CAMO covering continuing airworthiness. Cargo operates under IATA standards and increasingly under ONE Record as the successor to e-AWB.
For your aviation app, this means a number of non-negotiable design choices. Every change to a defect record, crew roster or ULD status must be auditable: who, when, from which device, under which approval. Data retention is regulated, so some records must be kept for years while others must be deleted within a set period. Role and permission structures are not a feature; they are a foundation.
For the part we don't do — safety-critical avionics under DO-178C or DO-254 — specialised avionics firms are the right choice. That domain follows a fundamentally different regime, with formal code reviews, tool qualification and certification at every development stage. Our focus is the layer around it, where modern mobile engineering does fit and where the value for your operation lies. For organisations that also deal with general security standards alongside aviation, an aviation app can sit well alongside an ISO 27001-compliant development process.
Cargo has its own subset of requirements. e-AWB and its evolution into ONE Record are the IATA standards gradually replacing the paper air waybill. A cargo handling app that handles ULD tracking and e-AWB but has no ONE Record path will become technical debt within a few years. For drone operations in the Netherlands, integration with LVNL and UAV oversight plays a similar role. Software that cannot automate airspace requests is already outdated in the commercial drone segment on the day it is delivered. We model these regulatory developments explicitly in the architecture, so that a later upgrade does not require a rebuild.
For most aviation apps we choose React Native or Flutter. One codebase for iOS, Android and, importantly in the cockpit, iPad. This keeps the release cadence high and ensures that a fix the purser reports tomorrow also reaches the captain.
For apps that are heavily offline, handle large datasets (chart libraries, manual packages running to hundreds of megabytes) or where performance is critical, we choose native iOS or Android. EFB-style applications often rely on this route.
Cloud backend (usually AWS or Azure within European regions, for data residency), event-driven with a sync protocol based on CRDTs or operational transforms. Edge components where latency to an airport matters.
The aviation software market is dominated by a handful of large players: Sabre, Amadeus, Lufthansa Systems, IBS Software and Honeywell GoDirect. For cockpit use, ForeFlight (owned by Boeing) and Jeppesen are the de facto standards. For training, CAE is dominant. In the Dutch market, local players such as AeroBuddies also come into play.
Those suites are usually fine, until they aren't. We see four scenarios where custom becomes the logical choice: a niche provider for whom no commercial package exists (for example a specific charter or MRO way of working), an organisation with deep integration between five or more systems where the standard APIs fall short, a mid-market player for whom the enterprise licensing model is unsustainable, and a white-label need from a handler serving multiple carriers at once with their own branding and data separation.
In all these cases the benefit is not only functional. A custom aviation app means your operation's way of working drives the software, rather than the other way round. For mid-size operators this is often the difference between working with the tool and working against it. We have applied similar logic before in other logistics contexts. See also our work on transport software and maritime software, where the same mix of offline working, regulation and multi-stakeholder flows applies.
A second consideration is data ownership. With a standard suite, your airline's or handler's operational data sits in the vendor's database, usually behind a closed API model and with licence fees per record or per user. That is acceptable for as long as the vendor and your organisation remain aligned, but it becomes a problem as soon as you want to switch, integrate with a new partner, or build your own data product, such as an operational dashboard or a KPI warehouse. With a custom aviation app, you keep that data in your own hands, on infrastructure you control, and you build on a foundation that grows with your operation.
We start with a short discovery on the shop floor: a ramp, a crew briefing room, an MRO hangar, a training centre. What we see there shapes the design more than any stakeholder workshop would. Aviation can't be designed from a Notion board.
From the second week onwards, we work in sprints with a testable release at the end of each one. The first sprints focus on the offline architecture and the critical path. Early users, a handful of crew members or engineers, give feedback before the bulk of the build is done.
We roll out by base, by shift or by handler location, through a managed canary process. That suits how aviation works: never switching everything over at once, and always being able to revert to the previous state. Only then do we scale up.
Crew rosters, briefings, manuals and operational tools for airlines that are too small for a full enterprise suite but too large for spreadsheets and email.
Turnaround apps, GSE tracking, ULD management and e-AWB workflows for handlers serving several carriers at once, often white-label.
Defect reporting, parts lookup and AD/SB tracking for Part-145 organisations, plus theory and checklist apps for flight schools and simulator training.
On the surface, aviation software resembles transport or logistics software, but under the bonnet everything is different. Connectivity is a variable: a crew app has to work on a tarmac at a remote airport just as well as in the head office. The operation never stops: an aircraft sitting at the gate costs money, so the software must never slow the operation down. Decisions are irreversible: a ground handler who ticks "done" when not everything is actually done sends the aircraft off with a problem.
That changes how we design. We use conservative defaults, strict validation, explicit confirmation steps on critical actions, and always give users an undo path where the physical world allows it. We apply enterprise-grade software engineering, as in our approach to enterprise software, but with an interaction model that suits someone standing on a ramp in a high-visibility vest.
Privacy and GDPR deserve separate attention. Crew and passenger data fall under strict EU rules, and in an international context (US, Middle East, Asia) export restrictions come into play. We build in data residency, encryption at rest and role-based access from sprint one, not as a feature at the end of the project.
Finally, aviation culture has its own language and its own norms. Just Culture in safety reporting means that a reporter is not punished for an honest mistake, so the software needs to support psychological safety, not just technical logging. CRM in this context stands for Crew Resource Management, not Customer Relationship Management. An app that respects the right language and the right decision-making hierarchy will be used by crew, engineers and handlers as a matter of course. An app that doesn't will be set aside after a week, however modern its design. You only pick up these kinds of details by watching closely in the workplace itself, and that is exactly where we begin every project.
A 30-minute introductory call in which we go through the aviation context you operate in — crew, ground, cargo, MRO, training or passenger — which regulations apply, and whether custom development is the right route alongside what the standard vendors offer.
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