Noteified

Login Screen
OTP Verification
Create a note
Open a note

Inspiration

With the rise of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and other short form content, social media has recently been more geared towards superficial, one-dimensional content on the internet. Spending hours on Tiktok and Instagram, we have felt a lack of real world, relatable interactions in our social media lives. Our team cherishes each interaction with our friends and peers, whether it’s a quick greeting or a deep catchup with a friend we have not seen in a long time. This led us to brainstorm a new fun way to help increase the number of exciting exchanges between friends, while also ensuring that each post felt meaningful and thrilling. That’s when we landed on Noteified.

What it does

Noteified is an interactive social media mobile application that utilizes the current location of a user to contextualize the content of their posts. Users will be notified when one of their friends has left a post nearby and they will only be able to see that post if they are within a 100 feet radius. Users are also able to see where their friends left notes, which leads to a fun geocaching experience as users are able to hunt down notes that their friends left around them.

How we built it

We built our mobile app with Flutter. We used the Twilio Verify API to identify users by phone numbers for authentication. We chose Firestore for our database because of its simplicity in integrating with Flutter and for its ability to listen in on real-time updates for implementing certain features. Real-time updates for the map of notes were much easier with Firestore than they otherwise would have been by using polling. For storing images we used Firebase Cloud Storage. Finally, we implemented a Flask server that runs independently of our app to send push notifications to users when they get close enough to notes.

Challenges we ran into

Build times in Flutter became extremely long so each time we added more packages and dependencies and had to rebuild, we wasted critical time. Additionally, sending remote notifications, both in the Simulator and in the final app, was much more complex than we originally anticipated. However, we were able to mitigate these challenges by researching documentation during downtime when we had to wait for XCode to rebuild our app. We also were able to utilize Flask to constantly query our database and use the user’s current location to make sure that users were correctly notified.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We implemented a friends system so you can limit the notes you see to only the ones your friends wrote. Posting notes works as we intended and you can only see the notes that are close enough to you. We are also proud of building an entire, functional social media app in 24 hours and building upon a unique idea.

What we learned

Flutter build times are extremely slow (especially when working with Firestore). Remote-triggered push notifications are also very hard to implement in a short amount of time. Most of us were not very familiar with flutter and had to learn to develop with it effectively in little time.

What's next for Noteified

We plan to publish Noteified on the app store, and launch it to the public. Additionally, we hope to elevate Noteified’s functionality by bringing in more features, like note groups, more precise notifications, time-capsule and private notes, as well as algorithms which limit the amount of notes that a person can see at a given amount of time (to prevent overload).