Inspiration

Hanging out with friends is an essential part of life to destress and build social connections. However, when trying to get food with friends, we are always indecisive and can never agree on a location. This app helps face that problem by letting everyone voice their option freely. It also allows for the discovery of great local places!

What it does

This is an iPhone app that everyone can enjoy with its intuitive design. It starts with a user logging in with a Google account using Google auth. This streamlines the process and ensures better security. It is then driven by what we have coined as circles. This is your group of friends you are going to vote with. It will prompt you to create a circle or to join one with a code. If you are creating a circle, a code will be generated with a share feature to make it easily accessible to all your friends.

Inspired by Tinder, all the restaurants in the area are shown with a star rating. You swipe right or heart the ones you like and left or press x for the ones you don't. At the end, it ranks them among all your friends so you can find your top pick and Munch!

How we built it

We brainstormed ideas and then compiled a list of features. Integrating dev-ops like GitHub allowed for group collaboration with ease. We set up a group repository and built out the basic UI for the app in Xcode. Once we started having the skeleton in place, we filled it out by implementing a backend hosted on Firebase with Firestore as the database and custom APIs to scrape the information from Google Places.

Challenges we ran into

We decided to be ambitious and try to learn something new from this hackathon. Going into this, none of us knew SwiftUI, which is the language to create native Apple apps. This led to many challenges, but by working together and dividing up the features, we were able to finish our app.

My Role

I worked on the back-end and the integration with the front-end. Mainly I focused on the use of Google Maps APIs and Firebase for serverless functions and datastores. I also interfaced with the Swift app to integrate the datastore and API into the front-end.