Lost and Find

App to report & help users find lost items within North Carolina and local communities.

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Inspiration

Inspired with helping people find their lost items within the local community, we noticed that people lose things a lot of the time and take long periods of time to find them (average 2.5 days a year). We also found other apps on the app store that had this concept, but they were either extremely buggy or unreliable most of the time.

What it does

The app has 2 main features, to report lost items and to find your lost items. You can report lost items by filling out categories and a description, as well as taking picture(s) of the lost item. Finding your lost item is similar, by filling out a category you can usually find your lost item if it was reported by someone.

How we built it

The majority of the app was coded in JavaScript, and React Native to host the app. We also used Firebase as a database to store all user and item data.

Challenges we faced

We faced a lot of challenges while building this project, such as building the database, building the final APK, and more. While building the database, we did not know how to integrate Firebase Storage into our app, and documentation on "how" to integrate Firebase Storage into an Expo/React Native app was kind of sparse. Moreover, Expo's own code to integrate Storage with the app did not work, so we had to design our own solution to this problem. For building the final APK, we had a challenge where the app would work fine on Expo Go, but when the APK was built, the screens would have an issue where the text got pushed down with a white bar at the top. To solve this issue, we did some research and figured out that the issue lied in how the Android Status Bar works with Expo Go vs. a built APK. We figured out that in Expo Go, the Status Bar is automatically managed, and that in an APK, the Status Bar is not automatically managed, so we had to set it manually in our code and build it from there.

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