Cosmify

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  Next Rocket Launch on Widget

Inspiration

Widgets are neat!

What it does

Widgets are relatively new features for Android and iOS devices that can show information from an app on the phone's home screen. Cosmify comes with a widget that displays the NASA picture of the day, as well as a random fun fact about space! It can display either a daily fun fact or the next scheduled launch of a rocket.

How we built it

We built an Android app using Kotlin, and a REST API backend using Flask (Python). We deployed our backend using the Google Cloud App Engine, and tested our Android App/Widget using Android Studio. We take advantage of several public APIs to retrieve the information that we show in our App/Widget.

Challenges we ran into

Deploying our backend in Google Cloud gave us some problems. Even though our backend is very simple, we took a long time to figure out how to get it to run in the cloud environment. Also, Android Widgets have very specific requirements that are not always well explained or documented. For example, it took a good amount of time to get an image to load in a widget from an internet URL. source.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everything working! Nobody on our team has experience with mobile app development, especially not something as specific as an Android home screen widget.

What we learned

We learned more about mobile app development (and how difficult it can be). We also gained familiarity with a major cloud service provider.

What's next for Cosmify

We could launch Cosmify in the Google Play Store for any space enthusiasts who want some fun facts

Built With

• flask
• google-cloud
• kotlin
• python