Homely

Connecting local cuisines with global currencies.

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Inspiration

"Necessity is the mother of invention" - Plato

The inspiration to build our app, came from the necessity of having such an app.

Did you know, over 65% of crimes, around the world, against foreign tourists are theft ?
The main reason for theft is tourists having lots of local cash in their hand, which leads them to some dangerous situations of theft and attack.
This has a very negative effect on tourism of that country also.
Every 1% rise in crime rate lead to half percent drop in tourism.

Tourists convert their native currency into local cash, not just only to enjoy their stay but also because it is accepted everywhere, unless we have a system that communicates between local and global and also provides quality services.
Also tourists have to stand in long queues at exchange counters for hours and then surrender their local currency they have before leaving the country.

We thought we need to do something about it. That's how we came up with Homely, because what's better than the feeling of home in a foreign land.

So in order to solve this broad issue of cash dependency, we decided to first solve it for the #1 thing that tourists love in foreign land, local food and cuisines.

What it does

We developed a food app specifically for foreigners which allows them to view, savor and experience the local restaurants and cuisines, all through the user's own native currency.
Our app is one-stop-solution for all those who want to experience the foreign land's food, but not worry about local currency in their hands.

How we built it

Thanks to Rapyd Collect API for managing all our global payments.
This API was great for us it supports 100+ different currencies and have very low transaction fees.

We used travel advisor API which is a public version of TripAdvisor API, for fetching all the nearby restaurants and their menus. We also built our own own APIs to further ease the backend and increase the performance of the app.

We used Flutter framework to build the UI and integrate all the APIs in our project.

Challenges we ran into

  1. The main challenge was to find a public API, which can provide us with the restaurants and their menus according to the user's location.
    Every API we found was either not giving enough results or was not free or public. Then ultimately we decided to use travel advisor API which was the closest to our needs.
  2. Another challenge was country time issues. Because all our teammates resided in different countries, initially we struggled to collab together, but later we understood each other's availability and collaborated accordingly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of our look and feel of our app and the fact that is will serve the world for a better cause.

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate with people from around the world. Learned the art of teamwork, communication and management.

What's next for Homely

This is just a prototype version and we still do not have real orders booking, because of unavailability of public or free APIs. Also right now we are just accepting payments in card, so accepting all types of payment is also among app's future scope.

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