The current housing marketplace for college students is in a state of disarray. Certain property listings only exist on one website and not the other, or solely on Facebook made by students looking for a subletter.
Introducing BearCave - the app to help students connect directly to their peers for property listings.
Bearcave sources data curated from a variety of real-estate holders around Berkeley, and queries its user for desired attributes of the property they're looking for. After entering parameters like location, price, and more, the app displays apartments matching those needs.
We built the app using Firebase for the database, connected to Swift in Xcode for a flushed out iOS application.
We ran into a lot of challenges with the Firebase backend not connecting correctly - and we solved this by fixing some CocoaPuffs dependencies within our podfile.
We're proud of creating a functional UI and successfully parsing through Firebase data retrieved through Swift.
All 3 of these technologies were new to us, so learning how to use each of them was a steep learning curve but very well worth it. Later we learned how they were to be used in conjunction with each other, which led to further specifics and more bugs to fix it. We learned a lot about client and server relationships, and also how to manage memory allocation.
In future software updates, BearCave will be updated to create user profiles of saved listings, and will integrate the add-post feature in-app.
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