Information

Motorway needed to replace a paper-based vehicle inspection process that was slow, inconsistent, and difficult to audit. Inspectors often spent hours completing handovers, with delays that cascaded into the wider buying and selling workflow. The business required a reliable, digital solution that could be used in the field, offline, and at scale.

In partnership with Build Circle, we delivered the Motorway Inspector app from the ground up. The application introduced structured inspection flows covering vehicle details, seller-reported issues, exterior and interior checks, wheels and tyres, and test drives. A custom damage-mapping system, photo capture tools, and offline-first data handling ensured inspectors could record vehicle condition quickly and with confidence, regardless of environment or connectivity.

The app went from zero to production in under a year, supporting thousands of inspectors across the UK. It transformed turnaround times from two weeks to under 20 minutes, giving Motorway the operational backbone for their end-to-end buying and selling experience. By combining robust architecture with user-focused design, the project set a new standard for reliability and scalability in field inspection technology.

Android engineering · Field operations

Motorway.

From paper-based handovers to a reliable inspection platform built for the field.

Case study / Android
The challenge

An inspection process that had to work anywhere.

Paper-based vehicle inspections were slow, inconsistent and difficult to audit. Inspectors needed a structured digital workflow they could trust on site: in poor light, under time pressure and without a reliable connection.

Screens from the Motorway Inspector app: photo capture, damage reporting on a car outline, and the inspection checklist
Motorway Inspector / Interface system
What we built

Structure for the work. Flexibility for the field.

A greenfield Android app, built from scratch in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose on an MVVM architecture, and shipped through a CI pipeline we helped set up to make every release more transparent.

  • Kotlin
  • Jetpack Compose
  • MVVM
  • WorkManager
  • Compose Canvas
  • CI
Evidence

Damage mapping

A damage mapper drawn on Compose's low-level Canvas API, with custom touch handling. It runs at 60 fps on lower-end field devices, and became a shared component across the company.

Capture

Camera and flows

A custom camera and gallery for consistent evidence photos in any light, and the exterior-inspection and sign-in flows around them.

Reliability

Offline-first

We designed and built the offline architecture: inspections queue on WorkManager and sync when conditions allow. Not one was lost to a dropped connection.

System

Components

A component library and theming system built from scratch and reused across every screen. Motorway's in-house team adopted the theming for their other Android mobile products.

Damage mapping
Guided photos
Instrument panel
Job details
The outcomeUnder 20 minutes.

From zero to production in 11 months. Inspections went from two weeks to under 20 minutes for more than 4,000 inspectors across the UK, with zero production crashes.