Local Shops app

An app to find low-cost purchases for product categories in local shops.

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Inspiration

It is hard to keep in the head which shop is the least expensive for a given kind of products. I wanted to have this app on my phone for a long time.

What it does

User enters prices of his/her favorite products in different shops.

Then for a given product kind, the app helps to find the least expensive shop.

For example, I can have "hamburger" in category "lunch", and then knowing that that and that shop has hamburgers for 15 ILS, it can find a cheap lunch. When clicking the price, Google Maps app launches to guide you to the shop.

The not yet implemented feature for shop-owners to enter prices can be integrated with Google Business. I think, there is not yet a full-featured pricing solution in Google Maps only because there were no sound categorization. I provide this solution: an editor of no-cycles direct acyclic graph of prices. So, I ask Google to integrate pricing from my app (when I add owner-edited prices) into Google Maps. Additionally, it is possible later to create global categories to order show-owners entering of categories. Sadly, as I mentioned, this feature is not yet implemented. I can implement it after receiving the $5000 prize.

How we built it

Flutter. My first phone app.

Challenges we ran into

How to sort, how to structure the Sqlite DB entities.

How to edit a directed acyclic graph of (sub)categories of products. Which dialog windows should it show e.g. if we add a category that already has subcategories and if we make a category a subcategory of what previously was its supercategory, how to ask user permissions for such operations.

What we learned

Flutter. Creating phone apps.

That kinds of products should be called "kinds" not "categories".

What's next for Purchases app

  • Use server-side proxy to restrict access to Google Map and sell access to it through Stripe. For this use my another hackathon project - Paid Google Maps Proxy.
  • Fix bugs mentioned in the file TODO.md.
  • Exchange of pricing data between buyers and between shops and buyers.
  • Make it a best-seller.
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