Inspiration
Everyone is familiar with Pokemon GO and Ingress- two hugely popular location-aware apps that encourage users to walk around. We wanted to apply these ideas to coupons and advertising- who doesn't want to walk around, get healthy, and get swag? To us, services like Groupon seem too limited to be effective.
What it does
Our project aims to serve location-based offers while the person is walking for health. We aim to bring businesses and people together through fitness. Using a points system, users will receive specialized offers and rewards based on how far they walk.
How we built it
We used the Android Studio and the Google Maps Location APIs, as well as Firebase for the back-end of our mobile app.
Challenges we ran into
It's important to make sure your development environment is set up the day prior to beginning development- we spent a lot of time fixing Android Studio and Gradle! Specific APIs, like Android Google Maps, can be very confusing for a programmer who is not familiar with them.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our project aims to be scalable from the very beginning- we are using Firebase for user authentication and storage of data, such that the app works as well for one user as it does for thousands of concurrent users.
What we learned
Planning is the most critical phase of software development, and takes the longest time. Git merge can be very touchy- be careful! Debugging is the second longest phase of software development, and the Android Studio debugger is your friend. Always be Echoing!
What's next for WalkaboutIt
We need to regularly check the velocity of users to make sure they aren't cheating. We need to reach out to local small businesses to add them to our network. Also, actual rewards and advertisements need to be added as the app is only a prototype. Porting to Xamarin for cross-platform compatibility.
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