Explorify

There is so much to do during university, which creates the feeling to make the most of it. I and my friends, however, am bad at planning so I developed an app that recommends and plans activities.

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Inspiration

Coming up with an idea was tough but the idea occurred to me when we and my friends wanted to plan something fun to do on the weekend. We were really bad at coming up with ideas as we wanted to try something new and planning the time and people going was going even worse. This led me to want to develop an app that allows me to manage planning things to do in the area and get recommendations for places to visit. I later got the idea to make it a social media as I was tired of inorganic media like Instagram that would focus on having hundreds to thousands of friends rather than just focused on hanging out with a small group of close friends.

What it does

The app allows messaging of friends and friend groups to make sure you know what's going on around the event. It also provides a map with marked locations for the events you will be attending soon and a sliding-up panel to feature the planned events and recommended events. You can create an event and have your friends join, which allows you to know who is attending. This allows the users to control every aspect of going out, the time, people attending, and the site of the event.

How we built it

The front end of the app is built with Flutter. Flutter has the wonderful trait of having cross-platform support, in other words, develops once, and use everywhere. To quickly develop a database and authentication, I used firebase, a back-end as a service (Baas), which manages the server and database so I can be adding backend features right away in the app. Firebase has amazing support for Flutter, not surprising as both were developed by Google. For state management, Bloc was used as it's not just one of the most popular state management tools for flutter but also provides great separation for UI and state components.

Challenges we ran into

By far, the biggest challenge was to simply develop a full-function app within just a short amount of time. Themeing, authentication, wireframes, database, and backend all within just a couple hours is hard to get done, especially done right.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the fastest I developed an MVP before, usually, it can take a couple of weeks to get a working product out but due to the time constraints, I was forced to push myself.

What we learned

Prior to the competition, I never developed a map interface with flutter before. Trying out the flutter_map package was a lot of fun and much easier than I initially thought it would be to use.

What's next for Explorify

Due to time constraints, there were a lot of features I wasn't able to add. I wanted to add a posts tab that allows friends to share their experiences and places they have been. Another feature is internalization, as I have a lot of family from Brazil, so having the app support many languages like Portuguese would allow them to see and use what I made. I would also love to add machine learning for recommendations so they can be more tailored to certain groups and people.

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