What your LMS provider should do in the first 30 days

By day 30 you should have taught one real batch on the new platform. Students have logged in on their own phones, a live class has run, a test has been taken and a fee has reached your institute's own bank account. That only happens if the provider starts the slow paperwork on day one, because store accounts and the payment gateway wait on documents and outside reviews. A first month spent on demos and "we'll set that up next week" is a fair preview of the year.

A 30-day plan you can hold a provider to

Use this as the agenda for the kickoff call, and ask for a named person against each line, on both sides. The weeks overlap in practice, but the order matters: anything that waits on an outside review starts first.

Week 1: the paperwork that decides your launch date

The month's longest waits belong to Dun & Bradstreet, Apple, Google and your payment gateway, so all four start this week, in parallel.

Apple's organisation enrolment needs a D-U-N-S number. Apple says to allow up to five business days to get one and two more before it can use the number, and expediting the request won't shorten that. Enrolment is in the legal entity's name, not the brand's, so students see your registered company name as the seller. The institute also needs a working public website on its own domain and a work email on that domain; a link to a social media page won't be accepted. The person who enrols must be able to bind the institute legally, such as the owner, a director or an employee given that authority. That person becomes the Account Holder, so it should never be someone from the provider.

If your institute is a sole proprietorship, Apple enrols you as an individual, and your personal name shows as the seller on the App Store.

Google Play also needs a D-U-N-S number for an organisation account. A personal account skips that, but one created after 13 November 2023 can't publish until it has run a closed test. That needs at least 12 testers, opted in for 14 days in a row. Your staff and pilot batch can be the testers, but it adds two weeks to the plan.

Both accounts should be yours, with the provider added as a user. In Play Console, the owner invites people from Users and permissions and can set an expiry date on their access. App Store Connect invites people the same way, under Users and Access, with roles such as App Manager.

Apple's review guideline 4.2.6 rejects apps built from a template or app-generation service unless the content provider submits them. On Google Play, an app moves to another developer account only when the account holding it starts the transfer. An app in the provider's account means leaving later depends on the provider's goodwill. There's more on ownership in our guide to creating your own coaching app.

The payment gateway account should be in your institute's name and settle into your own current account. Expect the gateway's team to look at your website before going live, so publish terms, refund and cancellation, privacy and contact pages this week. If fees go into the provider's account and reach you as a payout, that is a different arrangement with different costs. Our piece on gateway charges versus platform revenue share sets out the difference.

Register the domain for your website and student portal in your own name, and keep the registrar login yourself. If OTP and enrolment SMS will go out under your institute's sender name, the DLT registration, header and message templates need approval first. Since 1 October 2024, operators block SMS carrying links that haven't been whitelisted under TRAI's direction, so an "install our app" message needs its store link registered.

Week 2: store listings, submissions and a trial import

The store listings carry your name, so you approve every word: app name, icon, screenshots, descriptions and the privacy policy link. Both stores also want data declarations, the Data safety form on Google Play and the App Privacy details on Apple. The provider knows what its app collects and which SDKs it includes, so it should draft those answers. You review them, because they're published as your statements.

Submit both apps by the end of this week. Apple says it typically reviews 90% of submissions in under 48 hours. Google says it takes more time with certain developer accounts, up to seven days or longer in exceptional cases. A rejection means another review cycle, so leave room before any date you've announced. If Apple's enrolment is still pending, start the pilot on Android and the web, and add iPhone users later.

Don't send all your content at once. Send one complete course first, with its lectures, PDFs and a test, and check it on a budget Android phone over mobile data. Lectures should play in the right order, titles should fit a small screen and PDFs should open quickly. A good provider gives you a template for course structure and a spreadsheet format for students before you start, not after the first import goes wrong.

Question banks need their own trial. Pick the 20 hardest questions you have, with equations, diagrams, tables and Hindi, and import those before anything else. Hindi typed in a legacy font such as Kruti Dev looks right in Word but is stored as English letters underneath. It comes through as gibberish unless it's converted to Unicode first, so agree who does that conversion and when.

For students, the field to clean is the phone number, since most will log in with it and an OTP. Remove duplicates and fix numbers with missing digits. Decide what to do about siblings registered on a parent's number, because with phone login one number usually means one account. Import students who paid at the centre with their course and validity end date, so access matches what they paid for. If you're moving from another platform, our guide to migrating courses, videos and student data covers the exports to ask for.

Week 3: a pilot batch, and training for each role

Choose one batch of 40 to 80 students for the pilot, ideally one already mid-course, with a faculty member who is patient with technology. Don't pilot with the crash course starting next Monday, where every problem lands on hundreds of students in their first week. If you run only one batch of 60, the pilot is the launch, and that's fine. Pilot students should install the app from the store listing, not from an APK forwarded on WhatsApp. Sending APKs teaches students to install apps from outside the store, which is how fake and modified apps reach them later.

Training works best by role, in short sessions where each person does their own tasks while the provider watches. The front-desk counsellor enrols a walk-in student and applies a coupon. The batch coordinator schedules a week of live classes and uploads notes. Faculty start a class, write on the board and run a poll. The accounts person matches one day's gateway settlement against enrolments. Record each session, in Hindi if that's what your staff prefer, for the next person you hire. If the plan is one two-hour call for everyone and a PDF manual, push back.

Week 4: the first live class and the first test

Rehearse the first live class the day before, on the teacher's real setup. That means the same tablet or writing pad, the same room and the centre's broadband, with a phone hotspot as backup. Join as a student on a budget phone over mobile data. Check that the board is readable on a small screen and that chat and polls work. The recording should appear in the course afterwards, with the same protection as other lectures.

Make the first test a low-stakes sectional, not an all-India mock. Before results go out, work out one student's score by hand, negative marking included, and look at a formula question and a Hindi question on a phone. A mock with 2,000 students is the wrong place to discover that a section timer was set wrong. For larger tests later, see how to conduct an online exam for thousands of students.

Then test the money. Buy a course in the app with UPI, refund it, and trace both in the gateway dashboard and in your bank settlement. End the month with a review meeting: what the pilot found, what's fixed, what isn't, and a date for the full rollout.

Red flags in the first month

Any one of these can have an innocent explanation. Two or three together suggest the onboarding plan exists only in the sales deck.

• The app will go out under the provider's developer account "for now".
  
  
• Fees go into the provider's gateway account, with payouts to you later.
  
  
• Someone asks for your Play Console or Apple account password instead of asking you to add them as a user.
  
  
• There's no named person on their side, only a ticket queue or a WhatsApp group.
  
  
• Every student is to be imported in one go, with no sample import first.
  
  
• Training is a recorded video and a manual.
  
  
• Go-live is planned for the week a new batch starts.
  
  
• Nobody can show you how to export your own student list.
  
  

The two things on that list that are hardest to undo later are whose name the app is in and whose account the fees reach. Upclass apps carry the institute's own name on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac, and student fees go to the institute's own payment gateway. Bring one sample course and your batch calendar to a demo, and ask us to walk through this plan against them.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to get a coaching app on the Play Store and App Store?

Plan on two to four weeks, and most of that is paperwork rather than building. A new D-U-N-S number can take up to seven business days to reach Apple. Apple says it typically reviews 90% of submissions within 48 hours, while Google says some reviews take up to seven days. A personal Play account created after November 2023 adds a 14-day closed test.

Do I need a D-U-N-S number for my coaching app?

Yes, if you want the app listed under your institute's name. Apple and Google both ask for one for organisation accounts, and Apple's lookup lets you request one free from Dun & Bradstreet. A sole proprietorship enrols with Apple as an individual, so the owner's name shows as the seller.

Can existing students keep their logins when we switch?

Yes, if they log in with a phone number and an OTP. Import the list with correct numbers and their first login works as before. Passwords rarely move between platforms, so if your students use them today, tell them before the switch how that first login will work.