Connections

Inspiration

The main inspiration behind this app was the annoyances of having to share contact information with other people when meeting new people. Many of us on the team recently started our postgraduate course and found annoyances with having to double check phone numbers and usernames.

What it does

The app is a simple app that exchanges all your contact info with another persons device using android's nearby share feature.

How we built it

We used flutter to try and quickly make a working app that could achieve it. Since there was no backend required for this and everything was done on the client device, we did not use anything else. We first tried to make the UI for the app and then started implementing the actual data transfer between devices.

Challenges we ran into

Most of us did not have any experience with any kind of development, let alone flutter or dart. We originally wanted to implement the data transfer using NFC but ran into many problems. We then discovered that we would likely need to write the app natively instead of using flutter if we wanted to use NFC and decided to pivot over to use nearby share to transfer data instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were most proud of us being able to implement data transfer between two physical devices successfully using nearby share as the data transfer was what we found most difficulty with whilst building this app.

What we learned

Most of our team had no experience with app development, better understood how to use frameworks (like flutter) to develop apps. We also learned how to transfer data using the nearby share protocol in Android.