Engineering a Mobile Platform for Event Operations

Engineering a Mobile Platform for Event Operations

Delivering a reliable event mobile app is a live-operations engineering problem, not a feature checklist. This case study looks at how Toobler engineered ConnectMe by Informa — the onsite event mobile app for Informa Connect’s multi-event, physical-and-hybrid portfolio — covering agenda, badge scanning, lead capture and live engagement, with attendee and exhibitor experience treated as production infrastructure.

The context: a multi-event portfolio, live at physical venues

Informa Connect operates a large, recurring events business spanning multiple brands and formats — physical conferences, exhibitions and hybrid programmes running across a portfolio, not a single one-off show. Each event demanded a mobile app for attendees and exhibitors — delivered as ConnectMe by Informa — that could flex across different venues, audiences and configurations without being rebuilt each time.

This is the distinct challenge that separates onsite mobile engineering from back-office platform work: the software has to function inside a physical venue, under real crowd conditions, with no tolerance for failure on the day.

The challenge: high-density venues, zero room for failure

Physical event venues are among the hardest environments to build reliable software for:

• Overloaded Wi-Fi and cellular networks — thousands of attendees in one hall competing for the same bandwidth, at the exact moment engagement peaks.
• Connectivity dead zones — exhibition floors, basement session rooms and dense booth rows where signal simply disappears.
• Zero-tolerance reliability windows — an event mobile app has no “next release” to fix a live-day failure; it has to work correctly at the moment of onsite check-in, session start or lead scan.
• Complex onsite workflows — agenda changes, room reassignments, sponsor booth activity and badge-based interactions all happening in parallel, in real time, across a live crowd.

An event coordinator app or event manager app built to desktop-era assumptions about connectivity and latency will not survive this environment. Toobler’s engineering brief was to make the operational event software as dependable as the physical infrastructure around it.

The solution: a native mobile companion for onsite operations

Toobler engineered native iOS and Android applications functioning as the operational companion for attendees and exhibitors throughout the event day, covering:

• Agenda and venue navigation — personalised schedules and wayfinding across sprawling venue layouts.
• Sessions, live polling and Q&A — real-time audience interaction layered onto session content.
• Room presence and meetings — coordinating scheduled meetings and session attendance data.
• Booth interactions and badge scanning — structured capture of exhibitor-floor engagement.
• Lead capture — turning a badge scan into a usable, timestamped record.
• Content engagement and push notifications — keeping attendees informed of live changes as they happen.

Each capability was engineered as part of an integrated onsite event workflow, not a standalone screen — agenda, notifications and badge data all feed the same operational model so attendee, exhibitor and organiser views stay consistent during a live event.

Engineering for the real world, not the demo environment

The hardest engineering problems in event mobile app development show up only under live, high-density conditions — which is why this work was built and hardened around real event days, not a controlled test environment.

• Offline badge scanning — scanning continues even when connectivity drops, queuing scan and lead data locally and syncing automatically once a connection returns, so exhibitor lead capture never stalls because a hall loses signal.
• Real-time updates around live schedule changes — room swaps, delayed sessions and agenda edits propagate to attendees without requiring an app restart or manual refresh.
• Resilient onsite operation — the app is engineered to degrade gracefully under network stress rather than fail outright, keeping core onsite workflows usable even at peak venue load.

This is the difference between an event mobile app that looks complete in a product demo and one engineered to survive an actual show floor.

Turning onsite interaction into structured data

A badge scan is only valuable if it becomes usable commercial information. Toobler engineered the onsite data path so that:

1. An exhibitor scans an attendee badge at a booth.
2. The app prompts qualifying questions relevant to that interaction.
3. The scan and responses populate a real-time lead list on the exhibitor’s device.
4. Each lead record links back to the attendee’s registration data.
5. The structured lead record flows into commercial follow-up and reporting workflows after the event.

This turns the mobile app from a passive engagement tool into a structured data-capture layer — the onsite foundation that later feeds sponsor and exhibitor reporting, CRM activation and post-event intelligence work.

Results

Scale, adoption and reliability figures for this engagement are being finalised for publication with Informa Connect’s approval. What can be stated now is the engineering scope: a mobile platform built for onsite event operations, engineered for reliability under live-event conditions where connectivity is unpredictable and there is no second chance on the day.

What this means for your event platform today

Onsite mobile reliability is one part of a broader event-technology engineering discipline that also covers platform modernisation, event data and CRM integration, and governed AI features layered on top of existing systems. Toobler builds the intelligence, integration and product-engineering layer for enterprise event ecosystems — connecting the platforms already in place rather than replacing them, and turning onsite interaction data into commercial follow-through.

If your organisation is planning a new event mobile app, hardening an existing one for high-density venues, or connecting onsite data into CRM and reporting workflows, discuss your event platform use case with Toobler’s engineering team.