Inspiration
I wondered what it would look like if you took a twitch chat and made that available for people to create chat for any moment they wanted.
What it does
AirBug is a live chat platform. You create a chat, share the code and chat with your community, friends or even take part in some sport banter. Chat have the possibility to be enhance with what we call ChatKit, it's a bundle of tools to bring fun to your chats. Want to keep track of a sport game? Use the ScoreKit to get live scores update and coming soon you'll be able to have a listening session with your chat with MusicKit. The goal is to bring different interactive tools to you to enhance your chats.
How we built it
AirBug is built with firebase, Swift, SwiftUI, and a little bit of Vapor for the backend
Challenges we ran into
AirBug chats are only active for 24hrs and user have the option to extend the time limit, one of the main issue I encountered was with deleting chats. Easy solution is to get the time the chat is suppose to expire and minus it with the current date and delete, if it's over the 24hrs limit right? NOPE. What if a user change the time on their device? That would delete all the chats because the logic is handle client side (life of a broke indie dev). I ended up getting a Digital Ocean droplet and hosting a one line api that returns the server time as source of truth and calculating it from there to delete the chats.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Integrating out ScoreKit, we've manage to gain access to over 20+ sports league API, with that we are able to provide live score update to any game. With the NFL season on the way, we decided to focus mainly on that
What we learned
The beauty lies in the journey and that there is always beauty in the chaos. The were so many things that I had never tried, from working with vapor to implementing subscriptions with RevenueCat. I discovered something new about myself everyday during this process and I am very proud of what came out on the other end.
What's next for AirBug
With our launch, we decided to strategically attack a small audience. The mindset of servicing a niche group to get a good understanding of what you are doing right or wrong is one that I value. We've partnered with sport channels to bring football chats to their followers, with that we hope to find PMF and understand the benefits that user derive from our features.
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