Inspiration Walking through Montreal, we kept noticing incredible street art, pop-up galleries, and underground music events but no single place to discover the artists behind them. Social media algorithms bury local talent under viral content. We wanted to build something hyper-local: ArtConnect, a platform where artists in your city can find each other, share their work, and collaborate.
What We Built ArtConnect is a mobile app built with React Native + Expo that lets you:
Browse a live feed of posts from local artists Explore artists and events on an interactive map Message artists directly with real-time chat Discover trending work and upcoming events nearby How We Built It We used Expo Router for file-based navigation, Firebase Firestore for real-time messaging, and AsyncStorage for local persistence. The UI was built entirely from scratch no component library with custom gradients via react-native-svg and smooth animations through Expo's built-in stack transitions.
Stack: React Native · Expo · Firebase Firestore · TypeScript · expo-router Challenges The biggest challenge was real-time chat on mobile. Firebase's anonymous auth + Firestore subscriptions introduced race conditions when navigating between screens listeners would fire after components unmounted, causing state updates on dead components. We solved this by properly unsubscribing in useEffect cleanup functions.
We also had to balance mock data vs. live data pre-seeding conversations to make the demo feel alive without blocking the UI on async Firestore writes.
What We Learned How to structure a production-grade Expo app with typed routes Firebase Firestore real-time listeners in a React Native context That local artist communities are underserved by existing platforms and that there's real demand for something like ArtConnect
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