ScreenWean

Content Blocker
Content Limit
Post Page
Light Mode
Home Page with Categories
Feed

Inspiration

We've found the issue of endless, mindless scrolling as an extremely prevalent issue these days, shortening people's attention spans and consuming hours and hours of people's lives. Our app is designed to help you slowly wean yourself off of this habit little by little, until you eventually can cut the habit completely.

What it does

ScreenWean serves to replace mindless content with several categories of short videos (Weanies) pertaining to self-improvement, while enforcing a content limit. Content creators can also post videos that relate to each of these categories, catering to a specific audience. When users open the app, they are greeted with a prompt that allows them to set a limit to the number of videos they can view during their session. Afterwards, they can browse through videos relating to a specified category until they've hit their limit.

How we built it

The frontend is built with React Native (TypeScript) and the Expo framework. The backend is built with Node.js for the API endpoints to query data from a MongoDB database, also utilizing S3 Buckets to store the videos.

Challenges we ran into

In the beginning, we mostly ran into issues due to unfamiliarity with some of the technologies used, such as React Native, MongoDB, and AWS S3. However, we were able to overcome these spikes through reading the documentation and getting some assistance from AI tools, like GitHub Copilot. Besides these technical issues, we mostly struggled to devise an innovative idea that we were passionate about developing, but we were inspired by the idea of solving the epidemic of addicting, short-from content.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As we finish up this project, we are ultimately proud of creating a product that has the potential to change how short-form content can affect users. We were able to accomplish our minimum viable product, which consisted of being able to scroll through a limited feed of videos and also post content to that feed. In addition, we were able to create a feed based off user-selected categories and allow creators to classify their content for a more targeted audience.

What we learned

Throughout this journey, we were able to learn more about the full-stack development through an extensive tech stack and create a product that is geared towards a specific demographic. We also learned how to collaborate effectively, leveraging the varying skillsets of our members.

What's next for ScreenWean

In the future, we would like to focus on implementing user authentication, improving our app in terms of scalability, and hopefully being able to deploy our product.