Violet: A Space Just for Women

In a world of endless swipes, finding a genuine connection shouldn’t feel like an uphill battle. We aren't just another dating app, we are a space designed to protect your peace, identity, and time.

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We’ll handle the bots and the clutter so you can worry about the first date.

Inspiration

From our experience, there is not one comprehensive platform that is safe and effective for women seeking women. Women seeking women are often forced to navigate fake profiles/bots, male catfishing, identity fraud, couples/“unicorn hunters”, harassment, and invasive behavior.

What would a dating platform look like if authenticity, security, and safety were integrated into the product, not just an afterthought? We wanted to create a dedicated digital space where women can connect without noise, deception, or misaligned intentions.

What it does

Violet is a dating platform created exclusively for women seeking women in universities, built around safety, authenticity, and connection. Violet has features that are common across dating apps such as discovering new matches, your likes, messages, and a profile editing page as well as a few key distinctions that makes our fully free to use platform unique. To protect the integrity of the community, users complete an identity verification process that confirms their photos match their ID. A mandatory solo profile photo ensures transparency, and IDs are removed from our database after verification to protect privacy. We also use .edu email verification to further implement protection against bots and implement another safety restriction. To protect women from predominately straight couples seeking a third, we monitor for language associated with couples or third-party dynamics to reduce the emotional fatigue many women experience on broader platforms.

How we built it

Through trial and error, we began by creating the general page structure and establishing navigation links between screens, ensuring users could move smoothly through the app. Once the backbone was created, we focused on core features like user account creation, logging in, input validation, and the messaging system. With these components functional, we moved on to more specific features including password encryption, chat filtering, and email verification codes. Finally, we refined the user interface, making sure the design was cohesive, intuitive, and visually appealing, so that every interaction felt consistent across the app.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several challenges while building Violet. The paywall across reliable, popular, facial comparison tools made it difficult to access verification tools without a cost. Tools such as AWS Rekognize, GPT, and Microsoft Azure were all paid or heavily rate limited. Routing issues also arose due to the sheer number of pages and input fields. It was a challenge making sure that all of the user's input didn't fly away when the user navigated through pages. Email verification proved tricky because many packages that we wanted to use aren’t compatible with React Native. Handling P2P connections and directional data between users required precise calculations, and location pinpointing added complexity as we had to balance storing accurate location information with privacy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Creating a functional app as first time app developers
  • Smooth and visually pleasing UI
  • Designed a zero-retention ID system
  • Real-time messaging and likes/discover updating
  • Created a customizable chat filtering system without an invasion of privacy
  • Prioritized security through password encryption, temporary image storage, and email verification through a security code

What we learned

As new developers, this is our first time making a mobile app and we learned a lot throughout the process! We learned how to use React Native and got more comfortable with building components/managing app state. We got more familiar with API calls, whether for the facial recognition software or for our backend database. With MongoDB, we designed schemas and managed user/message data. For our messaging system, we implemented peer-to-peer networks to ensure private and secure communication. In the the ID verification feature, we learned how to integrate a camera app and process images that contained highly personal information in a secure way. Overall, this project taught us how to connect frontend and backend for mobile apps specifically, work with sensitive data, and implement complex features while keeping security and performance in mind.

What's next for Violet: A Space Just for Women

As Violet grows, we plan to strengthen user control and safety systems. We will refine the ID matching system. A blocking feature will allow members to instantly prevent specific users from viewing their profile or contacting them. We also want to introduce a preliminary contact-based blocking system, where users can optionally select their contacts to prevent people they already know from discovering their profile. We will implement a reporting system that allows users to flag harassment, inappropriate behavior, or suspicious accounts. Finally, we plan to move beyond static keyword filtering and implement a more intuitive natural language processing system that evaluates conversational intent and context.

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