Tether

Inspiration

A experience anyone can relate to is concern over the safety of a friend or loved ones. We wanted to create an application to help assuage these concerns as well as provide comfort to you and them by allowing quick communication and the ability to check in with them.
We initially wanted to create an application to help with safety in scenario's involving alcohol consumption, but due to complications we had to pivot.

Tether features the ability to connect to a friend and send them messages and responses to check in on them or indicate an emergency.
Users tap a button and that message is sent to their registered friend's device. The friend then can respond to the message.
Messages include an SOS signal, an indication that they are on the way, and indication that they are leaving, and an indication that they have arrived.

Our original idea was to create an app called BarTap which allowed for the user to set a drink limit and maximum dollar amount they wanted to set before going to a bar. The app utilized NFCs so the phone could interact with the bar and keep track and log the amount of drinks and the total amount of money spent so far by the user, and many other features were gonna be implemented. The biggest problem with the project was the fact Android Studio had documentation on how to interact with NFCs, but it DID NOT tell us that the documentation was super outdated and the code for it would't really work. The team was deep into the project at this point and we realized that the only thing we could really do was to pivot into another idea we had brainstormed earlier. That is where the Tether app was born in which we ran into our fair share of problems and our main one was dealing with MongoDB. We wanted to try this new MongoDB but reading all the documentation required simply was out of the picture since we only had limited time after the big pivot. The team decided to use Firebase which we have used in the past making it easier for us to develop code and such.

We were able to create a functioning application with limited remaining time late into the competition, while suffering from low spirits due to having to abandon the project we worked so hard on.
Able to create a full UI for the application.
Able to connect the application to the Firestore database.
Accomplished two functioning apps in the timespan of the competition, our initial idea that we had to abandon and Tether.

We learned that Android Studio has the worst documentation known to mankind and they should update it so people don't spend hours working on code only to find out that there code is outdated and simply not compatible.

The team doesn't see much potential in upscaling this project app specifically, but the original idea of BarTap not definitely had potential and upscale if worked on.