• 

  Home screen

• 

  Activity (event)

• 

  Profile

✨ Inspiration

The idea for Sporkly was born out of the need to make sports more accessible and increase social connections through sports. Finding free sports fields or people to play with can often be difficult, especially in a large city like Paris or New York. We noticed several problems that inspired us to create Sporkly :

• First, no site or app gathers all free sports fields in a unified experience, covering a wide variety of sports like football, tennis, basketball, table tennis, street workout, petanque, and running tracks.
• Practicing sports through clubs and gyms is still too expensive for many people, making it harder for them to stay active—which can lead to serious health problems in the long term.
• Most young people (15-30) spend a significant amount of time on their phones, which contributes to increasing loneliness and a more sedentary lifestyle.

We saw an opportunity to turn this around by using technology to bring people together through sports. Sporkly helps people stay active, connect with others, and easily find free sports facilities and events in their area—all from their phones. Our goal is to make spontaneous sports sessions and community-driven events accessible to everyone.

🎯 What it does

With Sporkly, you can get all the free sports fields around you in the Paris Region (other regions coming soon), join or create events for dozens of sports (football, tennis, basketball, table tennis, outdoor fitness, skating, running, bocce and more) and the whole community can join them. You can also contribute to the community and submit fields around you to help us making Sporkly the largest playground for sports and sporting encounters.

🚀 How we built it

Sporkly was built using a combination of modern technologies to ensure scalability and a seamless user experience. The backend is powered by FastAPI, offering fast and reliable APIs to manage user data, events, and sports field locations. We used Firebase Realtime database for fields, events and chat, Supabase PostgreSQL for user data and Firebase Auth for user authentication. The app was developed using React Native Expo for a consistent experience on both iOS and Android devices. We integrated Apple Maps and Google Maps to provide interactive maps with location markers.

🚨 Challenges we ran into

Building Sporkly came with its fair share of challenges. First, we had to ensure the data accuracy and quality of our documented free sports fields. We make sure every field submitted by an user is carefully and rigourously verified by us before being added to our database. Secondly, we needed to ensure that our software architecture can handle an increasing traffic and more and more fields while keeping high performance. Finally, we kept a special focus on UX to ensure an seamless experience for every user, to make sure that they stay on the app and talk about it to their friends and family.

🏅 Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first mobile app for both of us. Realizing a project of this scale, that can handle thousands of users with realtime features such as the events and chat, locations markers and social features is astonishing. Making an user interface that is nice looking and simple enough to use, that every beta tester loved has been encouraging.

🧑‍🎓 What we learned

Through this project, we gained deeper skills into working with location services, new cloud providers, and FastAPI for building scalable backend systems. We also learned how to create engaging user experiences and the importance of building strong community-driven platforms. Collaboration was key, and we learned to adapt quickly when challenges came across to ensure being on the right track to release Sporkly.

🌠 What's next for Sporkly

• Add more fields all over the world and not only in the Paris Region
• Release an Android version to increase our user coverage
• Introduce competitive and social features with gamification such as achievements, rankings and trophies to boost engagement (like Duolingo)
• Partner with local organizations and sports brands to bring exclusive events and field listings to the platform
• Introduce AI based features such as a Virtual Coach to join sports events based on the progress the user wants, and AI Summaries for chats in events

Game, Set, Sporkly !

Made in Paris with ❤️

Built With

• expo.io
• fastapi
• firebase
• react-native
• supabase