Built at Cybernetyx

Kneura

An AI-powered blended-learning platform for K-12 classrooms — running on Cybernetyx's interactive panels, which ship with a custom AOSP Android OS. No Play Store, no Google services: the apps, the updates and the canvas all had to be engineered from the platform up.

Plays muted

01 My contributions

As Principal Product Engineer II at Cybernetyx I spearheaded Android development for the Kneura platform — the apps teachers and students touch every day, and the invisible plumbing that keeps a fleet of classroom panels current.

• Cutting-edge Android applications tailored to individual student needs and learning styles.
• An intelligent assistant capable of customising learning curriculums to each student's unique requirements.
• A silent updater across all product variants — panels upgrade themselves in the background, so classrooms always have the latest features without anyone touching a settings screen.
• A download manager for the device — the backbone of the update service, detecting new versions, downloading them reliably over classroom networks and handing off to the silent installer.
• Canvas optimisation tools — maximising the huge interactive drawing surface and keeping the apps pixel-correct across the many screen resolutions and orientations the hardware family ships in.
• RxJava & threading discipline — reactive pipelines keeping downloads, sync and rendering off the main thread, so the board never stutters mid-lesson.

02 The challenge: Android without Google

Kneura's home is not a phone — it's an interactive classroom panel running a custom AOSP build. That changes the rules of Android development:

• No Play Store means no free distribution. On a phone, updates are Google's problem; on a custom AOSP panel they're yours. The answer was the download manager + silent-update pipeline: version checks, resilient downloads and background installs using the privileges a custom OS build makes possible.
• A wall-sized canvas is not a phone screen. Touch and drawing on a huge panel exposes every rendering inefficiency. The canvas tooling squeezed the most out of the surface while staying compatible across resolutions and orientations — one codebase, many hardware variants.
• A classroom cannot buffer. A lesson in front of thirty students is the worst possible time for jank or a blocking download. RxJava-based threading kept every heavy operation — sync, downloads, content loading — reactive and off the UI thread.
• Hardware ships once; software ships forever. Panels in schools can't be recalled for fixes. The update pipeline had to be conservative, resumable and safe to interrupt — a power cut mid-install could never brick a classroom.

03 The product

Kneura is Cybernetyx's unified virtual classroom platform — "Classroom 3.0", where learning travels beyond classroom walls. Launched in April 2020, it let institutions move online instantly while keeping the interactive panel at the heart of teaching.

• For educators — course management, lesson-plan creation and sharing, assignment distribution with auto-grading, and an AI-powered content repository (KSAR).
• For students — self-paced learning from anywhere, instant access to published lessons, and live tutoring in the virtual classroom.
• For institutions — two-step setup, centralised management of classes, curricula and syllabus allocation.
• Digital Avatar — AI-driven analytics tracking each student's knowledge acquisition, engagement and learning preferences over time — the intelligence behind the customised curriculums.

• Android
• Custom AOSP
• Kotlin
• RxJava
• Canvas & Graphics
• Hardware Integration
• Ed-tech