Shipping LoopVille to real students

LoopVille cleared Apple's Beta App Review on May 8 and Build 23 has been live on TestFlight since May 20. Real Lawrenceville students, real phones, real free blocks.

The decision: gate the door, not the build. Anyone can install from TestFlight, but the app holds new accounts in a pending state until approval, and lawrenceville.org signups auto-approve. That let me hand the link out freely without opening a campus app to the whole internet, and it moved moderation to the one place I can actually enforce it.

The tradeoff: an approval gate is friction exactly where an app can least afford it, the first sixty seconds. The pending screen went through its own round of fixes because early testers hit a stuck state there, which is the least charming possible first impression. Build 24 reworks it alongside removing invite codes entirely.

The thing that broke: quiet hours. Push notifications are supposed to respect "quiet during class," enforced server-side against each student's actual schedule, not just muted in the client. The first version of the dispatcher got the schedule window logic wrong in a way that only shows up when a real schedule has back-to-back commitments. A synthetic schedule never would have caught it.

The loop now runs the way the name promises: students use it between commitments, feedback lands, builds go out. Cohort feedback is steering the fall plan.