Unplugged

Inspiration

With the typical social media user spending an average of 2.4 hours a day—and teenagers nearly doubling that at 4.8 hours—new generations dedicate a significant portion of their time to consuming random content, much of which has little impact on their lives. Many of us have tried to quit social media entirely, only to experience FOMO, or the fear of missing out. After deleting our apps, we’re left wondering what our friends, family, and community are up to. This problem can especially be seen in college students. We rely heavily on social media to receive updates and news on local events or clubs and organizations that relate to us. That’s where Unplugged comes in! Unplugged offers a refreshing alternative to purging oneself from mainstream social media by allowing you to stay connected with loved ones and accounts that pertain to your everyday life while filtering all other media.

What it does

One of the main reasons social media is so addicting is because the platforms contain algorithms specifically intended on showing you new, irrelevant content to keep you on the app for longer. To tackle this issue, Unplugged consolidates the user's feed from various linked social media platforms (currently Facebook and Instagram) and filters out all mainstream media posts while keeping material from friends, followers, and select community accounts.

How we built it

We built this app using Swift and SwiftUI for native iOS devices. To combine social media feeds, we needed to have access to the latest feed for each user on each platform. Since Instagram and Facebook do not have APIs to get this data directly, we needed to reverse-engineer these APIs and endpoints using the user's cookies, generated from logging into each social media account for the first time.

Challenges we ran into

APIs: The most challenging piece of this project was accessing and ingesting network requests that were sent to Instagram and Facebook. The necessary APIs used aren't publicly available, so we had to examine the network requests and replicate the appropriate request bodies, which required us to essentially manually generate/mimic the actual browser headers. Parsing through the response data also proved to be a tricky task.

Swift: Another challenge we ran into was the learning curve for the framework we used. Only one of our team members initially had experience with mobile development, so there was a great deal of overhead when it came to the rest of the team navigating Swift.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring out the APIs

What we learned

Swift
Accessing and using cookies from a website

What's next for Unplugged

Looking ahead, we plan to expand our social media integrations to include Instagram Stories and TikTok, along with broader multi-platform support. Additionally, for Unplugged to be an all-in-one solution for managing mainstream social media, enabling users to comment, direct message, and post directly through our platform are all crucial features that we would like to implement.