Poober

Inspiration

As a group of four friends from the same hometown, we were all hanging out one day. Suddenly, one of us had to use the restroom immediately however all of them were occupied. So what do you do when duty calls? That's why we came up with Poober, an app that streamlines the process of finding a toilet in the area.

What it does

Poober is a way to connect toilet owners and toilet users. It allows toilet owners to connect with toilet users to find the nearest, most available toilets using a map.

How we built it

We connected Flutter to Firebase's backend. This allowed us to grab data on toilets near the user and display them elegantly on the map. Additionally, we used Firebase Authentication to handle logging in.

Challenges we ran into

A major problem that we ran into was trying to run flutter with firebase on iOS devices. There was a bug that didn't let us compile the code due to some import statements and Xcode issues. After nearly a day of googling and stack overflow, we were able to come up with a workaround. Another challenge we had was making sure the geolocation (map) was working properly but in the end we solved this problem as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of the fact that we could get geolocations connected with a map. This is because it makes it easier for users to find nearby, available toilets to them rather than go through lists of names and addresses to find a location. It especially feels nice since there are always emergencies so speed and ease are big priorities.

What we learned

We learned how to use Flutter, Firebase, and Google Cloud to connect and to create databases and link them through servers.

What's next for Poober

We're hoping that others can use Poober and we can gain some feedback on what users want. Also, some additional things we hope to add are creating better filters to ease user's navigation of the app, adding "favorite" locations, and giving ratings to different locations.