Nexu - Location based anonymous group chat

This is the main landing page
this is a sample comunity chat
this page lets user create group chat and add proper description
this screen displays nearby subsribed chats
This is the sign up page, when user wants to create a new community chat around him ( max 2km radius)

Inspiration

Traditional group chats require manual setup, invitations, or searching for relevant rooms, making it hard for people in shared physical spaces (like universities, events, or public spaces) to connect instantly. Nexu aims to remove these barriers by letting anyone in a location instantly join relevant conversations , no signup or group setup required:enabling true real-time, hyper-local community engagement.

What it does

Nexu is a hyper-local, location-based anonymous group chat app. Whenever a user enters a campus, event, or any specific venue, they’re instantly connected to a communal chatroom with everyone else there. Participation is anonymous by default, chats are ephemeral (access and history disappear after 24 hours), and everything is map-first: find, join, or create chats right where you are. The platform enables spontaneous, local conversations for sharing updates, organizing, asking questions, or just connecting with those nearby and sharing opinions.

How I built it

React Native + Expo delivers a fast, cross-platform app. DB is Supabase, its chosen to make the deployment easy. For the MVP, since i was building alone, I directly built on react native and this app is built to handle 120-150 concurrent users at a time chatting in a common group ( thats the max cap of live connections from supabase in a free tier, we can vertically scale it but it comes with a cost)

Challenges I ran into

Design for this application was a tough trade off i had to make since there was less time and more stuff to manage , they were more bugs then i anticipated and i had to make a call to focus less on design and build a lean MVP that focus on funcitionality than how UI looks Ensuring anonymous identity sticks across app restarts, but resets cleanly if the app data is erased. Biggest challenge was building this end to end all alone!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think i built a app which as a user badly wanted - crave instant communication , to talk to almost everyone at once in a lecture theatre, to immediately raise a poll in a classroom and check what people around are thinking, i think i am proud i solved this problem statement and this is almost ready for deployment and i just need to do load test before buying a domain and actually making this live :))

What I learned

Uber's H3's strengths and quirks around boundaries and k-rings.
build in a tight timeline is indeed a challenging part ## What's next for Nexu - Location based anonymous group chat Push notifications: Alert users to new messages in their active chats. Message reactions and emoji support. Photo and media sharing (with strong privacy/size controls). In-chat reporting for bad actors or spam detection. Full moderation dashboard for admins post-hackathon. build a seperate backend that handles most of the communications and build a websocket to enable multiple users participate in a group chat Push this to production ideally after all these are implemented