You meet new people online;But how often do you meet new people offline? How often do you form truly meaningful relationships with people? Connect wants to help you bond with real people in the world.
The app has not yet been published on the Play Store but you can find the APK File here.
More than 2.2 billion users have reported dissatisfaction with social media platforms. Comparisons between levels of happiness and popularity have taken away the essence to express and share ideas that really matter. The absence of inclusion and belonging, especially after covid, motivated my team and I to build an interface that brings the world together through live experiences.
Connect is a geolocation-based social networking platform that organises and facilitates in-person interactions. You can view users close by or people in your network that live far away by simply enabling the discovery mode. You can create events as well and meet new people around you. The program allows us to see users who are within a certain radius. We have also created a feed to explore events posted by connections or users that share similar interests so that individuals can immerse themselves in groups of their choice and propagate real change through face to face interactions.
The application was designed in Figma, and the prototype was built with Bravostudio. Much of the backend is written in python using Flask and psycopg2 for a PostgreSQL server, React-Chat-Engine was used to create the chat section in Javascript. Google Firebase managed the login/signup system to make the app safe and secure, and the API for Google places was used for some geolocation processing.
We wanted to incorporate pagination, however owing to time constraints, we were unable to do so. We also had some issues testing the app on various devices, and we weren't sure how Bravostudio interpreted the design files at times. One of the challenges we encountered was making the application robust. On iPhones, it would work perfectly, however on Androids, the designs were distorted. We eventually overcame the obstacle and were able to deliver our proposal on an android.
It was a fantastic learning experience! With only two of us on the team, we had to work extra hard to complete the project on time. Working on this app, we learned SQL for the first time. We also had to tackle several problems logically and come up with innovative ideas. Bravostudio makes it challenging to construct a real-time chat application, so coming up with a solution was fun. We also learnt more about Javascript's asynchronous functions. Albeit there are some bugs, we are delighted we incorporated the features we did.
We definitely plan to share the app with our extended social circles thus the most important next step for Connect is to smooth out the rough edges and get it onto the App Store and Playstore. To make Connect production-ready, we'll build up the backend and tidy up the interface for a more polished appearance. In addition, we'd want to include age restrictions, a more robust geolocation tool, and other features to improve the app's user experience.
We know that there are improvements to be made and the code is disorganised, but we got it working. I worked on all the frontend and backend coding while my partner worked on the design.