FoodBuddy

We unfortunately couldn't finish the project, so we don't have any demo. Thank you!

Inspiration

There are too many great places to eat when you visit a major city. This is great but you will suffer from the paradox of choice, for example, have you ever spent an hour just browsing Google Maps on which of the thousands of restaurants to eat next? This recommendation app intends to fix that problem by picking the best restaurant with only a single click based on the least amount of questions it can.

What it does

FoodBuddy is a mobile app that allows user to login and input their preferences to select an ideal restaurant. Based on user's preferences, the app will show restaurants one at a time. If swiped left, the next restaurant will appear. If swiped right, the app will redirect user to the restaurant's location.

How we built it

We design the UI in Figma, then implementing in ReactNative. The recommendation engine is based on the responses from google place API conresponding to information of users query. We also use FireStore in Firebase as a Database Mangagement System. The google cloud platform provides us API key to use in googe place.

Challenges we ran into

This is the first time we form the team, so it takes a while to shape the team and setup environment for the project. We had many problems running React Native on a simulator and even when we decided to use Expo, we also got many bugs that we needed to fix before we can set up the environment correctly and start coding. We had to to some new tools including ReactNative, Google Cloud Platform, Firebase, Google Place API. Therefore we face some trouble regarding authentication when fetching API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we learnt all the new API's and experimented with new languages. It was enjoyable when we were able to piece together the algorithm with the front end UI, after working on both parts separately. We persevered through many bugs in a time sensitive environment to complete this mobile app.

What we learned

We learned how to effectively split up workload in a team based environment, in order to complete tasks within a hard deadline. We also learned how to developer mobile app using React Native, FireBase and Google API.

What's next for FoodBuddy

Here are the future improvements for FoodBuddy:

Turn FoodBuddy to a social media platform for restaurants where owners pay to get posted
Improve Machine Learning to provide personalized recommendations based on user’s preferences, previous selections, and data we get from the user