iSpecies

Inspiration

I wanted to create an app for animal enthusiasts. I've always loved animals, since a kid. Zoo Tycoon 2 was my favorite pastime in my childhood.

What it does

In the home screen, there is an encyclopedia of more than 10,000 animals to browse through, for learning. You can take a picture of an animal and the app will identify it and provide relevant information about it, such as images, info, habitat range, etc. All animals you identify are stored into your personal collection.

How we built it

Built with React Native, Expo, Firebase, GPT-4o vision, and of course, RevenueCat.

Challenges we ran into

I had a challenge with the UI in the home page. I've always made dark mode compatible apps in the past, but with this one, since I wanted to add illustrations for each of the animal categories in the home page, I found it hard to integrate dark mode with the illustrations. Therefore, I made the app light mode only with a nice color mesh in the background. I thought it turned out good.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm honestly proud of how the app looks. I think the UI is beautiful and intuitive. One more thing I'm proud of is how the app functions in the back end. It provides responses very quickly.

What we learned

I learned the complexity of managing/building a database of animals. Building up the database took up most of the development time for this app.

What's next for iSpecies

I plan on fixing a few edge case bugs, and add more content in the home page of the app, such as articles that animal enthusiasts would appreciate.

Built With

• cloudflare
• expo.io
• firebase
• gpt4o-vision
• react-native
• revenuecat