Tafwyl Festival – Mobile App

Tafwyl is a free, two day festival which brings together the best of Welsh language music, arts and culture in the heart of Cardiff. With multiple stages featuring a wide variety of artists, a sports area, kids’ village, an array of street food and market stalls and more. In the past it's attracted nearly more than 40,000 visitors over the two-day event in the heart of Cardiff.

And we're also very proud to announce that we'll be working with Tafwyl as their Innovation Partners!

Pobl Tech was tasked with creating a bespoke, bilingual native mobile app for the hugely popular cultural event. The primary functionality of the app would be an updateable schedule for all the events taking place over the two days. The app would then offer information regarding food, drink and stall vendor listings as well as showcasing sponsors and the map of the event. Every part of the app would be bespoke, from design to development, with exactly what Tafwyl required.

For the technical elements...

We used React Native and Expo to build the mobile application. We choose to use React Native as we were required to build an app for both iOS and Android in a small timescale and this enabled us to quickly build an app for every environment. This allowed us to use all our code across both iOS and android and enabled us to hit the tight deadline set by Menter Caerdydd. This was an informed decision for this project - we can build both native and hybrid applications.

We used firebase as the authentication and data storage tool and choose firebase authentication as it allows us to use multiple providers and the ability to manage user accounts without the need to build complex user system. We used Firestore to store the data as this is a serverless document database that enables use to scale with demand, this enables us to have an app that can cope with an surge of use, such as a festival would occur. We managed to process over an one millions requests over a 2 day festival without any issues. We also took advantage of their built-in live synchronisation and offline mode, this enabled us to be still able to provide data, even when users were faced with signal issues.

We're looking forward to working with Menter Caerdydd and Tafwyl to evolve the app over the next few years. New ideas are flowing in with aspirations to create a truly interactive and engaging experience for festival attendees - and even for those who could not attend! The possibilities are endless...