iDex | Devpost

Inspiration

We found ourselves struggling to find good quality repairs for our units and amenities. We wanted to create something that would help people hire skilled handymen for repairs quickly and easily. Our app also helps repairers find customers.

The app registers all users (workers and customers) once they create their account. Customers can search for skilled workers required for repairs at the specified time and location on the app. Customers can also sort handymen based on specialty, such as a plumber, window/door repairer etc. Workers will be rated and reviewed after their service which will help classify them on their job and skill. The app includes an integrated Google Maps, that help customers specify their location and helps repairers find the customers easier. On their profile page, repairers can also specify working hours. Our app will make them online or offline automatically based on their working hours.

We used flutter and firebase to create the app. Firebase handled storing information, while Flutter was front end and server side. We also designed and drew our own logo using the free graphic designing tool on Canva.

In the beginning, our team consisted of 4 people. However, due to schedule conflicts, only two of us could work on it, so there wasn't enough manpower to achieve all the technical feats we wanted to. We had a hard time implementing the notification system, a better algorithm that finds the most suitable handymen, based on previous orders and some designing issues. Towards the end, due to some glitches and git requests, we had to delete some of our code.

Despite the challenges, we managed to complete our project. One of us is a first-time hacker who had never made an app or done graphic designing before and had to learn a lot of it from the beginning. We are proud of what we did, considering that we had only 24 hours, and we had to design an efficient database and algorithm to separate customers and repairers, and to fetch them based on their specialty.

We learned a lot about time management and how to prioritize parts of the app. Also, we greatly improved our knowledge of design, Android Studio, Flutter and Firebase.

We are planning on further improving the app, making it more user-friendly and adding more features such as reviews and comments, and an onboarding page. We also want to build a commission system, to make the app We will contact some repairmen to see what they would want the most in the app. After it's done, we will onboard handymen and finally launch the app in Kelowna.