Inspiration
As we've grown older, we've started to cherish our friendships a lot more and realize its importance in our lives. However, it also gets harder to maintain connections with old friends, or make new friends. So, we've tried creating an app that incentivizes shared experiences.
What it does
After signing in, you can add other users as friends. Because you haven't had any events together, our app represents your relationship as a budding sapling—new, but with much room for growth. After you've met someone, or done something fun with a person, you can add pictures to that event to memorialize it. You'll be rewarded with a little growth; your sapling may grow a bit. As you meet with the other person more and grow your relationship, you can add your events on the app. You can also look back on the past, to see how far you've gotten.
How we built it
We used expo as well as react-native, to build a cross-platform Android/iOS app. We also used Firebase authentication to store users, realtime database to store data and relationships, and cloud storage to store images.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge we've dealt with is how to store all of our photos as well as user information. We decided on using Firebase, as that would simplify our backend significantly. When the user wants to send a photo, we store it in Firebase cloud storage with a unique id, which we associate with two people.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of being to accomplish so much in so little time: setting up the authentication, the chat services, as well as the photo upload services. We're also happy with how our app turned out; by using Expo, we made both Android and iOS versions of our app. Overall, we learned a ton about database management, user interfaces, and authentication.
What we learned
We learned how to use Expo, and how to develop mobile apps. We also learned how to best store the photos and link them to accounts.
What's next for Memories
We'd like to add a chat system on to the app, as well as an occasional push notification that invites you to talk to an old acquaintance, or give you a prompt to you and a friend to answer.
Award categories
HEALTH 1001, DIGITAL ART 4510, best use of google cloud
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