App logo
Login Activity
Registration mode
registration details for customer
successful customer registration
registration details for vendor
location recorded for vendor
successful vendor registration
detecting customer location
no registered local vendors in the vicinity of the user.
User Feed showing local vendors in their vicinity.
Displaying Details of the vendor
Modification of menu by the vendor
Updation of working hours by the vendor
successful updation of working hours.

Inspiration

A lot of local vendors find it difficult to run their services and compete with the large chain restaurants and stores. Often these vendors are not able to offer their services to the users and get unnoticed easily. Mostly these vendors are poor people and find it very hard to have a good lifestyle. This inspired us to make an app, free of any costs, that can be helpful to a great extent to these local vendors.

A brief description of what our app provides:-

Cost-free services to local vendors. A secured login and registration authentication for both customers as well as local vendors. All the details for local vendors will be taken and verified. For Local Vendors:- Our app provides multiple functionalities for these vendors. It provides them to add the menu, add a new post providing the description for their shops, update working hours and also update their locations if these vendors shift to a different locality in the future. All the changes made in the menu are displayed in detail in the form of a list for the vendors. Also our app allows the vendors **to add any offers for their stores and the same will be reflected in the feed of customers. For Customers:- Ability to detect location of the user and display all the details of local vendors(registered in our app) in the vicinity of about 3kms. Along with the above, the user will also have a feed that will display all the posts and regular updates if any made by the local vendors. Also for a particular vendor selected, the address, its operating hours, and contact info are provided.

How we built the app

We were able to develop this app within a limited time with the help of enhanced resources like android-studio and firebase database. The basic functioning of the app is developed using JAVA classes. All these classes are integrated with the firebase realtime database and the connection part was a bit easy due to the pre-defined resources in the android-studio. The implementation to detect the location of the user and display local vendors was only possible because of the google maps API. The GUI of the app is made using XML tags that android-studio provides and also a basic layout was first made using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The implementation of google maps and location tracking was one of the most difficult tasks for us as none of us were familiar with the API. As all of us are not together and are far apart from each other, the task of coordinating with each other was a bit difficult. It was a bit difficult to find out the bugs in our project at different stages but we were able to find those bugs and debug our project. In the end we were short on time, and there is a small error in our video but all those bugs are fixed and our app is working properly and can be tested with the apk provided in additional info

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to provide a fully functional app in a very short amount of time. Also because of this pandemic co ordinating amongst ourselves was a mammoth task for us, but still somehow we made it and we are really proud of it.

What we learned

Although we are a bit familiar with android studio, we learned different methods in GUI implementation as well as different APIs that Google provides. Also, we expanded our knowledge on making custom adapters, list views, and classes in JAVA.