Building the Pure Air Hydration App: A Cross-Platform Customer Platform on Google Cloud

Pure Air Hydration makes atmospheric water generators — machines that produce clean drinking water from the air. Their customers needed a single, trustworthy place to manage the systems they live with day to day: their devices, their subscription and billing, and their support. This article walks through how we built that experience as one cross-platform application on Google Cloud, and why a small team could deliver and run it.

One Codebase, Three Platforms

The customer app is a single cross-platform codebase that ships to web, iOS and Android at the same time. Every screen and component is built to a strict cross-platform standard, so a customer gets a true native app on their phone and a full experience in the browser at pureairhydration.com — with feature parity everywhere. Writing each feature once and validating it on every platform is how a lean team keeps three targets at the same quality.

A Google Cloud-Native Backend

Behind the app is a cloud-native platform we architected on Google Cloud from day one. Choosing managed, serverless-leaning components let the team focus on the product instead of running infrastructure. The core pieces are:

• Cloud-native API on Google Cloud: The customer API is a cloud-native service on Google Cloud (GCP) infrastructure, auto-scaling with demand without a server to operate.
• Managed, consistent data: The system of record runs on Google Cloud (GCP) infrastructure, giving us a horizontally-scalable, strongly-consistent database that keeps account, device, billing and support data correct at any scale.
• Managed authentication: Identity, sign-in and token verification run on Google Cloud's managed authentication, enforced as middleware on every protected request — with one-time-code login, optional authenticator-app two-factor and device-level biometric lock on mobile.
• Stripe billing: Subscriptions, invoices and the self-service billing portal are handled through Stripe, so sensitive payment details never touch our own systems.

What the App Does for Customers

The app is built so a customer can handle everything themselves. They can see each device on their account with live status and maintenance reminders and register a new one in a few taps; review their subscription, update their payment method through a secure billing portal and download invoices; and raise a support request against a specific device — with photo attachments and a threaded conversation that stays in context until it is resolved. The whole experience is fully localised in eight languages, including a right-to-left layout, with push and in-app notifications keeping people informed.

Engineered to Be Operated

Delivering the app was only half the work; we also run it. Structured logging on Google Cloud, encrypted secrets, transactional email and SMS, and cloud push notifications are all wired in and owned in-house, so the same team that designed the architecture also handles its day-two operations and continues to evolve it safely.

Why It Matters for the Work We Do