Sniped

Loading Screen
Login
Select Tag
Add Friend via #
Snipe Confirmation
Feed

Inspiration

Imagine a person using social media. Maybe you’re thinking of someone adding pictures to their instagram, craving the social validation it gives them. Maybe you’re thinking of the Twitter-addicted techbro’s. Maybe, you’re even thinking of someone doom-scrolling on TikTok until 3am. All of these scenarios have one thing in common: they show how tech promotes loneliness and negative emotions .

We often hear how traditional social media platforms reward sensationalism and often evoke a sense of isolation and envy. In fact, they capitalize on it.

However, we think this doesn’t need to be the case. We think there is room for technology that helps build community and facilitates social interaction (and with that, health and wellbeing - the number one predictor of happiness is social connection. Science has shown lack of it is as bad for us as smoking).

As a student, we participate in a variety of communities, from student organizations, athletic groups, to classes. Across these various college groups, each with their own cultures, we were introduced to one particular tradition that we found invaluable to develop our relationships in these communities: ‘Sniping’ each other.

See how this looks - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XSrZIBi9_qzLnW7g_iklaUmvo-58XtolT3NeGePicOg/edit?usp=sharing

Sniping, a popular tradition amongst our close friends, means to take candids of our peers ‘in the wild’. We sought to build a community-centric platform out of this phenomenon.

What it does

Sniped is a mobile app that gamifies the act of recognizing another. As a user, you can catch a picture of your friends walking to class, grinding a problem set in the library, or wherever else you might see them. These ‘snipes’ are then shared to a feed visible only to friends who have added you.

We hope that in bridging the first step towards a greeting, Sniped can help to build communities by fostering stronger relationships amongst its members.

How we built it

Snipes utilizes React Native with Expo to leverage the framework’s cross-platform compatibility as well as streamlined development process. To store user data and images, we used Supabase, which provided out-of-the box authentication and session features. We added one-time-passwords with twilio text messages. We relied heavily on Git branches for version control. (Caffeine played a critical role across all our endeavors). A lot of caffeine!

Challenges & Accomplishments

With Sniped being our first full-stack mobile application, we are proud of the challenges we were able to overcome.

Although we had experience with React.js, we had to adapt our entire workflow to function with React Native and expo. All that in 36 hours was very challenging, especially with the lack of good documentation readily available.

It was our first time using Supabase in conjunction with React Native. Here, our most significant hurdle was implementing the onboarding experience, storing images and handling file-based routing. It was also Will’s first time creating cross-table SQL statements, a critical component to the snipes feed.

Yet, we still stand by the fact that doing is the best way of learning. Over the weekend, we picked up the core ideas of mobile development, designing an engaging and highly functional application from scratch.

What's next for Sniped

Looking onwards, we are excited to continue building Sniped. We hope to introduce groups that users can create for their own specific communities. In doing so, we aim to implement a leaderboard feature for users to keep track of their snipes. We also envision adding a number of social-related features, such as contact syncing, link-sharing, and being able to engage with snipes.