theResearch

Of The Researchers, By The Researchers, For the Researchers.

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Inspiration

Current Social media apps lack a focus on education, making it challenging for researchers (and students) to share and access valuable knowledge/ideas. Inspired by this gap, I created a research-centric social media application to provide a dedicated space for sharing research. Our platform fosters collaboration, knowledge exchange, and meaningful research discussions, offering a purposeful environment. This social media app aims to move away from the distractions of mainstream social media and prioritize learning and information sharing.

What it does

The platform allows users to sign up and login securely through email, password, or Google. The auth state is persisted by the device so that the user doesn't have to sign in twice. Users can easily share research papers (PDF and title, it's that simple!) and receive AI-generated summaries. The platform displays all research entries on one page and allows users to toggle between top research based on discussions or funding. Users can contribute to research by buying funds through in-app purchases and after that, funding research they like. The system provides transparency by showcasing each user's research portfolio and the funds they've raised till date showing their credibility. The interface is user-friendly, interactive, and works on both Android and iOS devices.

How we built it

Tech Used: Flutter, Firebase, Gemini, Stripe

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced was integrating in-app purchases of funds into our application. There were multiple in-app purchase technologies we could use. The one that stood out to us the most was Stripe. Payment integrations with Stripe and other technologies have great documentation but the same cannot be said about Flutter. The documentation is outdated as Flutter evolves very quickly with breaking changes. So, our challenge became adding Stripe to our app based on past documentation and intuition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that even though the odds of using Stripe and other technologies were against us, we, never for a second thought of backing down and giving up. We achieved way more than our expectations and added a lot of features than what we initially expected. This gives us the confidence to build better, more progressive apps in the future.

What we learned

We learned that creating a full-stack app like theResearch is totally possible within 24 hours. We have to stay extremely focused on our plan and never doubt ourselves at any moment. Other than that, we also learned the importance of documentation for packages/plugins. Other than that, we also have gained a great amount of experience with Firebase and have a deeper understanding of how layouts work in Flutter.

What's next for theResearch

  • Implementing Pagination to reduce API calls
  • Making research reading more fun (adding more interactivity)
  • Researcher tools like Adding Polls, Surveys
  • Notifications & Push Notifications
  • Displaying related videos on YouTube
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