AhoyRoomie

Ahoy Roomie is an app designed to streamline the process of finding a roommate. With a few taps through our initial survey, users are able to quickly find matches and chat with them in real time.

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Inspiration

We noticed that sometimes, our roommates would have some unexpected behaviors that would have been nice to know about before we bunked with them. We also noticed that finding brand new roommates was kind of awkward, with people just creating posts requesting that people reach out to them if they seemed interesting enough. We knew that we wanted to create an app that made this process much easier, and thus "Ahoy Roomie" was born.

What it does

Ahoy Roomie is a relatively easy-to-use app that makes it quick to find roommates. First, users must log in or create an account so that their profile information can be saved. Next, they can go to the profile page and fill out basic information about themselves. Finally, they can go to the chat page to view the people who matched their basic information the most and chat with them to learn more about each other and whether or not they'll be a good fit.

How we built it

We wrote the code in Java on Android Studio. We created different Activity pages for each main screen of the app, and divided the home menus into fragments of a "main page" activity. We also created many XML files to handle how each feature looked. For the chat, we are starting off by using the free version of the ScaleDrone API to do the backend for live chat.

Challenges we ran into

There were many issues with programming the app because we were not completely familiar with programming in Android Studio. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to transfer information between different components like activities or buttons. It also took us a while to figure out how to use Android's own helper for handling SQL databases. Plus, it was hard for us to choose a good API for handling the chat backend because many were locked behind a paywall, so we just chose the last one we had and implemented it; this resulted in a few more issues because many important features like message history were still in beta testing for the API we chose.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very happy with how clean our app looks. We are also happy that we can save information for different users. It is also very satisfying to see people chat in real-time.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to program in Android Studio, so now we know the relationships between XML files, Activities, and fragments. We also got a lot better at adding and editing information in a database. We also learned how to implement live chatting. Almost every aspect of this app was a new experience for us, so we were happy to get most of it done.

What's next for Ahoy Roomie

One thing we need to fix is the database we used for our app. We would like to switch to a global database where all phones can add information or access it instead of just using the database specific to each device. We also could work a little more on our matching algorithm, as the runtime does not seem optimal and there are many cases that can result in ties for how well two people match. Finally, we will want to switch to a different API for the chatting backend because our features are pretty limited by the one we ended up using.

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