How Parents Built an Open‑Source School App to Beat a $117M Failure

The official Stockholm school platform, Skolplattformen, was built with a budget of about 1.17 billion Swedish kronor (≈ $117 million) but earned a dismal 1.2‑star rating and was widely criticized for its complexity and unreliability.

Three programmer‑parents, led by Christian Landgren, grew tired of the broken system and, in their spare time, created a simplified, open‑source replacement called Öppna Skolplattformen. The project is hosted on GitHub and was first released on 12 February 2021.

Landgren and his collaborators reverse‑engineered the private API of the official platform using Chrome’s developer tools, extracted URLs and payloads, and built a lightweight client that displays basic school information such as calendars, daily schedules, teacher notices, cafeteria menus, and sick‑leave reporting.

The city government responded with warnings, legal threats, and even police involvement, accusing the open‑source app of illegal data access. Despite these pressures, the volunteer team continued to update the app, releasing seven updates by March to counter official changes.

Öppna Skolplattformen, priced at €1, has been downloaded over 12 500 times on iOS and Android, earning an average rating of 4.2 stars. It uses Sweden’s BankID for authentication and accesses only publicly available data, though early versions briefly handled some personal information, which was later removed.

The controversy highlights a broader tension between privacy protection and interoperability. While authorities claim the open‑source app threatens user privacy, the official platform itself suffers from severe security flaws, and the open‑source version has helped expose these issues.

The article also introduces the concept of “privacy washing,” where entities invoke privacy concerns to suppress legitimate third‑party development and audits, citing examples such as the Ad Observer project’s clash with Facebook.

Overall, the case demonstrates how community‑driven reverse engineering can produce more usable, transparent software, but also how powerful institutions may use privacy arguments to stifle competition.