Inspiration
I used to share photos and videos - on Facebook and Instagram and a bit on Snapchat. But then I stopped. Because of influencers and noisy public feed - my posts were lost in the feed. If I post something on Instagram, all I see is a bunch of likes and comments from random people. So I wanted to build a network to share stuff thats personal and have a conversation with the people I know. Also, don't want to see irrelevant posts from a totally random person. Had this idea for quite sometime and now I've built it.
What it does
- Lets a user to create groups and share media.
- Shared media lives for 24 hrs.
- A user can post a max of 24 photos and videos (to be added pretty soon)
- Prevents scroll fatigue.
How I built it
Used Google Firebase and Functions and ReactNative+Swift. Started off with building a stub UI workflow. Then, used Firebase auth and FireStore to implement authentication and to store data. Then, started accessing APIs like contacts, camera to build the app. At the same time, I had to also write Google Cloud functions to handle the requests and other business logic.
Challenges I ran into
- Firebase Auth limits to a few real phone number testing. So, fewer real phone number tests.
- Firebase cold start - devised a small hack to keep the functions warm as the write event triggers other connected parts in my cloud functions.
- iOS 13 compatibility issues - was able to fix them.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- I have a working app!
- Google Cloud Functions were a bit tricky to implement as there were quite a lot of things that I had to handle. Was finally able to implement them.
What I learned
- You can turn an idea into an actual working product if you put in hard work.
What's next for Storry
- Add features to hit MVP stage and release it soon on Apple App Store and Google Play Store - maybe in the next 2-3 weeks.
- Get feedback and start adding features like video share, AR experiences, story discussion, SDK and so on.
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