Tinguify

Inspiration

Although social media is becoming more and more prevalent in our daily lives, nearly every social app is geared towards the interaction between people of similar ages. Not only does this limit the diversity of social interactions for every user, it also causes the loss of valuable experience and knowledge. It’s unrealistic to advocate for the limited use of social media, given their popularity. Instead, we were inspired to use this popularity to our advantage, creating a social media app to counter this generation divide.

What it does

Tinguify is an app that brings people of similar interests, but different ages, together. Users can create their profiles and set their interests, then chat with a diverse group to form meaningful social connections. To facilitate selection, they can designate preferred group size, gender, and geographical distance. If they feel that their group is not the best fit for them, users can choose to be matched with a new group up to three times a month. We hope this will allow users to build their own cross-generational communities online.

How we built it

We started by using expo to create a basic framework, then began creating wireframes. Once we had wireframes and had an idea for what the flow of the app would be like, we built the folder structure of our app and outlined the logic between the different pages. Finally, we rendered pages and tested them.

Challenges we ran into

Although Tinguify was our final idea, it wasn’t our first. Initially, we struggled for hours to integrate the API into our app before realizing that it was not compatible with mobile devices. We didn’t want to give up the idea of creating an app; we felt that in this era of technology, apps are more convenient and more relevant than ever. So instead, we scrapped our initial idea, and Tinguify was created.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Going into this project, our team had very little experience with React Native and iOS development; throughout the event, however, we quickly ramped up and built a preliminary demo that we were proud of.

What we learned

We learned about the complete design process, from concept to execution. Additionally, we learned the basics of creating an app using React Native and Expo.

What’s next for Tinguify

In the next steps for Tinguify, we’d like to improve the security of our app through additional features such as the ability to report malicious users as well as additional verification measures for creating an account. In addition, we’d like to improve our matching algorithm to create better communities. As of now, we haven’t yet integrated a database into our app, but this is something we’d like to do in the future.