Eco Pet

First-run screen
Select a pet
Check on your pet

Inspiration

We were interested in the possibilities of the 'environmental' stream, and one thing which occurred to us when thinking about ways to improve environmental impact was that people need to use their phones longer. So we went about trying to find ways to do that.

What it does

The app is designed as a pet, inspired by electronic pets of the past, like the 'tamagotchi', such that a user might grow to care for it. However, the only real way it can grow is by sitting on the user's phone for several years! Hopefully, the attachment to their pets will help users actually want to minimise their e-waste, rather than feel guilty about it and do it anyway.

How we built it

We used figma to design the UI, then react-native with expo to create an android app whith our intended design. Dummy values are present to display an everyday use-case, but unfortunately the underlying functionality is not yet fully ready. We looked into how to stop users from transferring the app to a new phone, and we have a plan (essentially storing phone data at first run) but this is not implemented either.

Challenges we ran into

Time. Ideally, the app will track time since its initialisation and that will be the year count it displays, while it also track battery health and overall phone wellbeing (this includes news data about global environmental health). But we did not have time to finish these aspects.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think our app looks cool! And we're proud of our approach of trying to encourage users with positive reinforcement, instead of bullying them into doing the right thing.

What we learned

We should have used the time during the week to get some of it ready. Losing 2 marks would have been fine. Also, some familiarity with the tooling would have helped - Charlie ended up being the only developer, but none of us really knew how to use react-native beforehand.

What's next for Eco Pet

Not sure. Hopefully a minimally functional version of the app on the play store!

Built With

Submitted to

Melbourne Hack 2021

Created by

I made the react-native app, and helped with planning. I was inexperienced but gave it a go :D

Charles Taylor
I worked on buiding Basic model of the idea and extended function. Also, I helped with creating the UI of the app.

Private user
I did some work on the UI design. Collaborated with Jongho on the UI. It was my first hackathon but i enjoyed it!

Rajan Pusalkar
Just Me.
It was my first hackathon and although I did not contribute much to the UI design I formulated the presentation. Great first experience!

Henry Do