One platform, eight apps

Sustivo is a multi-tenant platform for waste management and sustainability, used by three groups of people whose work has almost nothing in common: the general public, field workers, and the people who manage the service. We deliver it as eight role-specific apps rather than one, and every one of them is free and publicly available in the app stores. This page explains both decisions.

1. In short

• One company publishes all eight apps: INFOSHARE CONSULTING SRL, Romania.
• Each app is a complete standalone product with its own primary purpose, its own users, its own device permissions and its own release cycle. None is a re-skin of another.
• Three of the eight are consumer apps: Sustivo is the full engagement programme, while Maps and Calendar ship the platform’s two headline features as products of their own, for the many people who only ever want one of them.
• All eight are free, contain no in-app purchases, and are localised in English, Romanian, Hungarian, German and French.
• The people who use our staff apps are employees of our customers — independent municipalities and collection companies — not our own employees, and they use their own personal phones. The public app stores are the only channel that reaches them.

2. What the platform is

Sustivo digitises the whole waste-and-sustainability loop for a locality:

• a resident finds their collection day, locates a recycling or donation point, reports an overflowing bin or illegal dumping, and earns rewards for verified sustainable actions;
• a collection operator plans routes, sends drivers out, records every collection with proof of service, and produces the receipts and reports its contract requires;
• a municipality or platform administrator configures regions, streets, collection programmes, content, campaigns and user access.

The platform is country-agnostic by design: countries, region types, administrative units, streets, languages and role permissions are data, not code. The same build serves a Romanian county, a Hungarian town or a German operator, and we are actively expanding beyond our first market.

Two commercial products are built on the platform and sold separately to different buyers: Sustivo — community sustainability and citizen engagement, bought by municipalities, associations and companies; and SmartCollect — waste-collection field operations, bought by collection companies and haulers.

3. The eight apps

All three consumer apps are complete applications rather than content viewers: each has its own free Sustivo account and profile, its own settings (interface language across five languages, light, dark or system theme), its own menu — settings, about, FAQ, privacy, terms — its own interactive workflow and its own saved state.

4. Why separate apps and not one

4.1 Three audiences that never overlap

A resident, a driver employed by a hauling company, and a municipal administrator are three different people doing three different jobs. A resident will never plan a route. A driver will never configure permissions. An administrator will never scan their own reward code. In a single combined app, almost everyone who installed it would be unable to use almost all of it.

4.2 Maps, Calendar and Sustivo: unbundling by need, not only by role

Not every split in our platform is a split by role. Maps and Calendar are a split by need.

Two questions dominate everything a resident ever asks us: “where can I take this?” and “when is my waste collected?” Each is a headline feature of the platform in its own right, and in practice people want one or the other. Roughly half of the residents who come to us want only the map — they have something to recycle, donate or repair right now, and they need the nearest place that takes it. The other half want only the schedule — they need to know which bin goes out tonight. Comparatively few want both, and only a minority want the full engagement programme on top of either.

Sustivo is that full programme: calendar, map, problem reports, collection requests, donations, challenges, rewards, receipts and a community feed. It is the right app for a resident who wants to take part in everything their locality runs. It is the wrong app for someone who wants a twenty-second address lookup: making them download an entire engagement platform, set up a profile in it and navigate past challenges and leaderboards to reach one screen is exactly the friction that makes people give up and go back to guessing which day the bin goes out. We are not willing to charge a user that tax for a feature they never asked for.

So the two questions people actually search for ship as products of their own. That is also how people search an app store: “recycling map near me” and “waste collection schedule” are different searches by different people, and neither of them is looking for a community engagement platform. It mirrors what large publishers have long done — shipping focused, single-purpose apps alongside the full suite, so that a user installs the one thing they came for.

None of the three is a cut-down copy of another. Each is a complete application with its own account, settings, menu and saved state, and each is built around a different core interaction: a live filtered map with multi-select category filters and place detail sheets; a guided address flow (country → region → street → number) resolving into a month grid of collection days by waste type; and a multi-feature engagement platform. They also sit in three different store categories — Navigation, Utilities and Lifestyle — because that is genuinely where each belongs.

4.3 Each app has a different primary task, not a different tab

• Driver is a one-handed, high-contrast, glance-in-a-moving-vehicle interface with offline collection recording for rural routes with no signal.
• Smart Collect Admin is a dense back office — schedulers, data tables, receipt registers, analytics, exports — designed for tablet and desktop.
• Scanner is a single-purpose camera tool used dozens of times an hour; its home screen is one tap from the camera and does nothing else.
• Maps and Calendar each build a whole app around one of those two questions — filters, pickers, place sheets, a month grid, address selection, settings and account — for the people who want that answer and not the rest of the programme.
• Sustivo is a consumer engagement app; Admin and Super Admin are configuration consoles.

Beyond sign-in and profile, the feature overlap between any two of these apps is effectively zero.

4.4 Privileged code does not belong on a consumer device

Super Admin can reconfigure an entire country’s deployment. Smart Collect Admin can read the operational history of a whole collection company. Admin can edit the collection programme a whole city relies on. Shipping all of that inside the app residents install would place every administrative code path on hundreds of thousands of consumer devices. Separate apps mean an attacker holding a resident’s phone holds only the resident app — the administrative surface is not there at all.

4.5 Data protection by design

As an EU controller we are required to apply data minimisation (GDPR Art. 5(1)(c)), data protection by design and by default (Art. 25) and appropriate technical measures (Art. 32). Role-separated apps make those boundaries architectural rather than a runtime flag: the citizen app is technically incapable of retrieving operator data, and the driver app is technically incapable of retrieving another organisation’s data.

4.6 Device permissions stay honest

Permissions are declared per app, and ours genuinely differ: the driver app uses location and voice input, the coordinator app uses location, the scanner uses the camera, and the consumer and administration apps use none of those. Merged into one binary, every resident would install an app declaring the union of all of them — and a privacy label describing collection that has nothing to do with them.

4.7 Different contexts, devices and reliability needs

The driver app runs on a phone in a truck cab, in the rain, often with no network, for a whole shift. The coordinator console runs on a tablet or desktop in an office. The citizen app runs on whatever phone a resident happens to own, including old low-end devices. One binary optimised for all three compromises all three.

4.8 Independent release cycles

A crew’s workday depends on the driver app. A consumer content update must never be able to delay or destabilise a field-critical release, and a driver hotfix must never wait behind an unrelated consumer feature.

4.9 They are sold as separate products

A municipality may buy citizen engagement without operating a single truck. A private hauler may buy collection operations without any citizen-facing programme. Bundling everything into one app would force every customer to distribute software they have not bought and do not use.

5. Why every app is publicly available

5.1 Our users are not our employees

Enterprise distribution programmes exist for internal apps a company gives to its own staff. The people using Smart Collect Driver are employees of our customers — independent collection companies — so those programmes do not apply to us.

5.2 Managed distribution cannot reach our customers

Private or “custom app” distribution requires each customer organisation to enrol in a business programme, hold company registration identifiers, be located in a supported country, and then manage app distribution to its own staff. Our buyers include village halls, small public services and two-truck family haulers whose crews use their own personal phones and who have no IT department. We also ship no per-customer builds: one binary serves every organisation, and everything is determined by the account that signs in.

5.3 Zero-friction onboarding is a functional requirement

A hauler hires a driver on Monday and needs them collecting on Tuesday. A driver drops their phone in a bin lorry and must be working again within the hour. A crew triples in size for a spring cleanup. A municipality evaluating us wants to hand three phones to three people and try it this afternoon, before any contract exists. In each case the app store is the only channel that works: search, install, sign in, work.

5.4 Public listing is how buyers verify us

Public-sector buyers routinely check that the software they are procuring is real, published and maintained. A live store listing with a version history is the evidence they ask for.

5.5 The consumer apps obviously must be public

Sustivo, Maps and Calendar are for the general public of an entire locality — every resident, in every locality we serve, most of whom find us by searching a store for the one thing they need. Their whole value depends on any resident being able to find and install them.

5.6 Public listing keeps every deployment patched

Store distribution means a security fix reaches every organisation in every country at once, with automatic updates. Private distribution across thousands of small organisations would leave stale builds running in the field indefinitely.

5.7 Requiring an account is not a reason to hide an app

Like most business software in the app stores, our staff apps are free to download and require a work account to be useful. The download is public and safe; the data is protected by authentication and role-based authorisation. Nothing in any of the eight apps is for sale.

6. What the apps share — and what they don’t

All eight apps are built from a single codebase and share an internal foundation: authentication, design system, translations and data access. That is the same engineering practice behind every company that ships a family of apps.

What they do not share is what matters: purpose, audience, navigation, screens, data, permissions and store category. The split runs along two axes that both hold up on inspection — by role, and, for Maps and Calendar, by the single question the user came to answer. The consumer apps carry none of the administration code, and the administration apps carry none of the consumer features.

7. For app store review teams

• Sustivo Maps and Sustivo Calendar — demo credentials are supplied with each submission. The menu at the top left reaches the account area, settings, language and theme; the map’s category filter and the calendar’s country → region → street → number flow are the main interactions to exercise.
• For the other six, working demo credentials are supplied with each submission, pre-loaded with realistic data for that role: the driver account has an assigned route with stops, the coordinator account has clients, vehicles and receipts, the administration accounts have a configured demo region.
• Smart Collect Driver can be reviewed in airplane mode to see offline recording; collections queue locally and sync when connectivity returns.
• Sustivo Scanner validates QR codes generated by the Sustivo citizen app; a sample code can be scanned from a second device or a printout.
• Account deletion is available inside every one of the eight apps, as Apple Guideline 5.1.1(v) requires: the profile screen (or, in Maps and Calendar, the menu → My account) has Delete account at the bottom. The user chooses what to remove — this app’s profile, a selection, or the whole account — and must type a confirmation word by hand before it runs, so it can never happen by mis-tap. Step-by-step instructions per app: account deletion.
• If any credential fails or more demo data is needed, we respond the same day at contact@sustivo.eco.

8. Contact

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