Spotlet

Many areas, especially mixed apartment/family home neighborhoods suffer from a lack of street parking. Spotlet allows homeowners to rent their garage or driveway parking space to those who need it.

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Inspiration

Many of us live in parking impacted neighborhoods, where coming home after 9pm can mean circling the block or parking long distances from home. Especially late at night, no one wants to walk several blocks from their car to their home. However, many homeowners do not use all of the parking spaces that their property has. Whether the garage is being used for storage, or the driveway lays empty every night, these viable parking spaces could be utilized to help reduce this critical parking problem and earn their owners a little bit of money as well.

What Does it Do?

Spotlet allows homeowners to sublet their driveway or garage by the hour to someone looking for a parking space. All the lister has to do is include a few details about location, car size their parking space can accommodate, and cost to get started. Meanwhile, people searching for spots can easily find something close to them by opening the app.

Building Process

First, we conceptually planned the layout and design of the app, and then we delegated different parts of the app to different team members. Each person specialized in their delegated task, and helped each other out with the knowledge they acquired through research. We then merged all of our files and programmed our different screens to interact with each other in an intuitive way.

Challenges We Faced

As all of us did not have experience with Android Studio, Kotlin, or Firebase prior to Rose Hack, we had to learn how to maneuver and harness Android Studio to implement our ideas. This required processing large amounts of information and applying this information shortly afterwards. We also ran into several issues with merging our files through Github. In addition, we weren't familiar with databases, and decided to use FireBase in order to store and retrieve user data. This was challenging in terms of figuring out how to use FireBase and how to use databases in general.

Accomplishments

  • Aesthetically pleasing interface
  • User friendly
  • Learning three completely new technologies in under 24 hours
  • Successfully linking firebase authentication to be able to create new users

What We Learned

We learned how to delegate tasks effectively among a team, how to manage our time, and how to persevere through difficulties. We also gained a lot of practical experience with databases and app development.

What's Next for Spotlet

With more time, we would like to implement the following features:

  • A 5-star rating system that allows users to rate the parking spaces that they've used through the app.
  • A field on a user's parking space listing that retrieves and displays the safety rating of the area from an existing database.
  • A listings page that allows the user to select from all of the parking spaces available within a certain distance from their current location.
  • Allowing users to upload a profile picture and a picture of their driveway. This would mean linking with the camera app on the user's phone.
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