Food Friend

View trending locations
Viewing food options at a dining hall
Creating a food item
Creating an event
The map screen

Inspiration

As college students, we often find ourselves struggling to find good, cheap food on campus. That is why we created Food Friend, an app designed for students to upload and view details about all types of food near them.

What it does

The initial page is a map of campus from the Google Maps API, in which users can view and click on the “pins” of different restaurants and food locations. When you click on a pin, it displays the menu options at that place, as well as average user ratings and prices. Users have the ability to create their own pins and add food items to each location and rate them. If there is free food somewhere, users can also pin that location so that other people can view it. Food Friend also allows users to rate food items that are available that day. Users who are logged in can vote for their favorites, and the most liked foods will appear on the Trending page, so that other users can view the most popular foods of the day. The social element of the app allows users to log in and create events, where they can set the time, location at one of the restaurants, and invite their friends who also have accounts.

How we built it

We wanted to be able to make sure both Android and iPhone users could use this app, so we used Flutter in order to integrate both operating systems. Flutter operates with the language Dart. We used the Google Maps API to view the map of campus and show the pins, and we used Google Firebase to store all the information about food events and user logins.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had used Flutter, Dart, or Firebase before, so the beginning of our project was a bit of a learning curve as we aimed to navigate our way through this new territory. It was really cool getting to learn these awesome new technologies! The biggest technical challenge we ran into was being able to update the visuals on the app realtime with updates on the backend database. For instance, when users created or removed pins, we had to be able to make sure that they would immediately show up or disappear from the map view. Also, getting the user authentication to work and ensuring that each user could only upvote/downvote

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

We learned that even as first-years, we are capable of a lot. Even though the four of us only met two months ago, we work really well as a team. Also, we learned that fixing the small details often takes more time than anything else.

What's next for Food Friend

We want to enhance the social media aspect of the app, and publish it to the App Store for Georgia Tech students to use. We also want to expand the app to all schools across the nation and even the world, not just Georgia Tech.