AU Citizenship Test Prep

Inspiration

I have made test prep apps before, so I wanted to try Australia next. While reading up on the Australian citizenship test I found a rule I hadn't seen before. You need 15 out of 20 to pass, but you also have to get all 5 Australian values questions right. If you miss one of those, you fail, even with 19/20.

Most of the apps I found on the store just give you a big pile of questions. I wanted one that takes that values rule seriously, so that's what this app is built around!

What it does

There's a 'Values Drill' for the values questions, with mastery tracking per question so you can see which ones you still get wrong. There are 630 practice questions based on the official study booklet, Our Common Bond, with an explanation for each one.

The 40 mock exams use the real format: 20 questions, 45 minutes, and you only pass with 15/20 plus 5/5 on values. If you fail because of a values question, the results screen tells you that.

Wrong answers and starred questions go into 'Smart Review' until you get them right twice. You can also enter your test date and get a daily goal, and there's a timeline where you can track your citizenship steps. Lessons and flashcards cover all 4 chapters. Everything works offline and you don't need an account.

How I built it

It's a Flutter app using Riverpod and Drift (with all progress stored on the device). RevenueCat handles purchases. There's one lifetime product, one entitlement, and a paywall built with RevenueCat Paywall. The paywall opens from 8 different places in the app and each one is tracked separately, so I'll be able to see which ones actually lead to purchases. AdMob does the ads and PostHog does the analytics.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest one was that I don't live in Australia. I know the Canadian process well, but for Australia I had the booklet and not much else, and I didn't feel confident I understood what people actually go through.

So I joined online communities where people are preparing for Australian visas and citizenship, and read a lot of posts. I wanted to know what people were nervous about before the test, and why the ones who failed had failed. (what I found: a lot of the stress was about the values questions, not the history) That changed what I put first in the app!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I passed the mock exams using only the app :p I'm not Australian and I never read the booklet. I just did the lessons, practiced, cleared my Smart Review, and then sat the mocks with the real rules (15/20 and 5/5 on values). That was the moment I believed the app works, and not just that it has a lot of questions in it.

I built it in about 5-weeks, from an empty project to a live app on Google Play (iOS is in App Store review). That includes 630 questions, 120 flashcards, 40 mock exams and 4 lessons, all based on the booklet and checked against it, plus 100+ automated tests.

And the whole app comes back to one rule. The Values Drill, the mock results, the free tier and the paywall are all built around the 5/5 values rule that fails people with 19/20!

What we learned

The best place for a paywall is right after the app has shown what it can do, not when someone hits a wall. A free tier that works for one book doesn't automatically work for another. And when your users have a deadline, not using a subscription is something you can actually sell.

What's next for AU Citizenship Test Prep

I want to see which of the 8 paywall placements actually convert and drop the ones that don't. I'd like to try some pricing experiments with RevenueCat Experiments. I'm also thinking about translating the explanations into the languages most new Australians speak. The test itself is in English, but you shouldn't need perfect English to understand why an answer is right.

Built With

• flutter