Furnishare

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Inspiration

Moving into a shared home is exciting until it’s time to decide what goes inside it. One roommate wants a cozy couch, another prefers a minimalist look, and everyone has a different budget. Suddenly, furnishing a living room becomes a collection of scattered links, screenshots, and messages asking, “Would this fit?” or “Does everyone like this?”

We wanted to make that process feel more collaborative and stress-free. Choosing furniture should be a way to imagine your home together, with room for everyone’s tastes and needs.

That is why we created Furnishare: an app where roommates can bring their floor plan, visions, and conversations together to turn an empty space into a home.

What it does

Furnishare helps roommates design and furnish their shared spaces together. Users can create an account, form or join a group, and upload a floor plan. From there, they can share their preferences and the overall vibe they want for their space, whether that’s cozy, minimalist, colorful, or something in between. Furnishare uses those preferences to suggest furniture and decor items they can buy, helping roommates find pieces that work together and reflect their shared style.

Roommates can also see how furniture would look in their actual space. As users scan around the room with their device’s camera, Furnishare places virtual, three-dimensional furniture models into the camera view, making it look as though the pieces are physically in the room. This helps them see how a couch, table, or other item would fit alongside their existing surroundings. Users can also move and rotate furniture in the app to experiment with different arrangements and design a layout together before committing to a purchase.

Additionally, Furnishare helps roommates work through the financial side of designing a space. Within the app, they can define budgets, split costs, decide who is paying for which items, keeping their design plans and payment responsibilities in one shared place.

We also wanted collaboration to fit naturally into how people already communicate. Through our Photon messaging integration, invitations to join a group, furniture suggestions, and approval requests can reach roommates directly on their phones through iMessage. Instead of expecting everyone to keep checking the app, Furnishare brings decisions into their everyday conversations.

How we built it

Furnishare is an iOS app built with Swift and SwiftUI. We use a Python FastAPI backend to handle requests and connect the app’s features with external APIs. SQLite stores user accounts and group information. Gemini generates furniture and decor recommendations based on roommates’ preferences and the overall vibe they want for their home. Photon Spectrum integration enables the messaging features. It sends group invitations by text and lets roommates submit preferences and approve or reject suggestions through messaging. Those responses are passed to the app to inform recommendations and update shared decisions. Capital One’s Nessie API provides sample banking data for demonstrating budgeting and cost splitting, including how roommates divide expenses and decide who pays for each item.

Challenges we ran into

We originally wanted to create a group chat where all roommates could receive an invitation, share preferences, and discuss furniture together. However, our Photon Pro plan did not support creating group chats, so we adapted the feature to use individual text conversations. Roommates could still submit preferences and approve or reject suggestions through text, with their responses connected to the shared group in the app. This is something we would hope to integrate in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of bringing room design, furniture recommendations, cost splitting, and messaging together into a seamless app experience. We built an iOS app with Swift and SwiftUI despite having little prior experience with them, learning as we went. The augmented reality features were especially exciting. Being able to scan a room and visualize 3D furniture within it made our idea feel tangible, helping users see how their design choices could look in their own home.

What we learned

We learned more about iOS development, as well as how to plan and build an app from start to finish. That included creating wireframes, planning the user interface, connecting the frontend and backend, and testing how the features worked together. We also learned how early design decisions affect implementation and how testing helps us identify gaps and refine the user experience.

What’s next for Furnishare

We want to expand from individual messaging to group messaging, allowing the app to create a shared chat where roommates can receive invitations to join their group, submit preferences, and keep all design conversations in one place. We also plan to continue refining furniture and decor recommendations to better reflect everyone’s tastes and budget, and add security controls such as account verification and permissions for accessing and updating shared spaces.