Favor App

🤯 Inspiration

As busy and broke college students, we’re usually missing semi-essential items. Most of us just suffer a little and just go without, but what if there was an alternative? Say you need a vacuum. More often than not, someone living in your hall has one they aren’t opposed to sharing! Building upon this principle, our app aims to connect “haves” with “have-nots” and create a closer community along the way.

🧐 What it does

Our app provides an easy-use platform for students to share favors between each other; two clear use-cases are borrowing items and running convenience store errands. In addition, this application encourages tighter communities and helps reduce consumerist waste(not everyone in a dorm hall needs their own of everything!).

🥸 How we built it

Frontend: built in React Native with Expo, run on Xcode simulator
Backend : authentication with Firebase, Typescript, TypeORM, GraphQL used to power Node server with Apollo editor to communicate with CockroachDB.
Design and UI: Figma and Google Slide
Pitching : Loom and Adobe Premiere

😅 Challenges we ran into

We were unable to find a UI/UX designer for our team and initially struggled with getting the project off the ground. Heather dedicated most of her time filling that role by learning how to operate Figma and tried her very best to make an aesthetically pretty mock-up and final pitch.
It was also difficult to work through many time zones and keep track of all members; we lost a backend person in last minute so Hung stepped up to the challenge to learn GraphQL, CockroachDB, and TypeORM in a really short time.
Of course scope

😊 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Heather is super proud of surviving her first hackathon and having her idea finally somewhat come to life! She also now realizes how much there is left to learn and is excited to explore more into UI/UX design and what goes into developing a mobile app.
Hung somehow managed to implement React Native App with expo, GraphQL & Node server in less than 24 hours

🤔 What we learned

We learned that having a reliable designer is super important, and how time moves super fast when you are having fun!
Having a high bar is good but also terrifying :^(

😤 What's next for Favor App

We built a relatively functional minimum featured project over the past two days; however, we would like to implement GPS reliability and optimization algorithms in order to increase the amount of favors completed and make fulfilling favors easier. The ultimate goal is to tailor favor requests so fulfilling them doesn’t deviate from the helpers’ normal daily routines. We would also like to include more game-like features and other incentives. We could see ourselves using and relying on something like this a lot, so this hackathon will hopefully not be the end!