Plant Keeper | Devpost

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Inspiration

We wanted to take away the stresses of all plant parents around the world. Leaving your plant children at home without any water while you vacation in the Bahamas - every plant parents worst nightmare! However, we have a solution!

According to Statistics Canada, there were approximately 885.58 million Canadian dollars worth of potted plants sold in Canada in 2020, an increase from around 789.68 million in 2017. Most house plants, however, can only last 1-2 weeks without being watered. This can be a source of concern for people who need their plants watered when they are on vacation, and/or businesses that close during holidays and have plenty of indoor plants.

We have created an IOS app that makes it easy for people to have their plants watered for them. Studies have shown that indoor plants can clean indoor air by absorbing toxins and increasing humidity; they also boost moods, productivity, and creativity while also reducing stress levels. Not only will this platform make people’s lives easier, but it will also encourage people to buy more house plants, by eliminating a major deterrent that discourages people from buying plants.

What it does

People sign-up as plant-keepers by entering their information and location, and will be contacted when someone needs their plants watered. On the other side, people in need of plant-keeping have access to a list of all plant-keepers in their area, and have access to their contact information.

How we built it

We built our project using Swift, a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple, and XCode, Apple's integrated development environment for macOS. To store the list of users, we created a database in Firebase and utilised GCP. Our app queries the database in real time to get information regarding plant keepers.

Challenges we ran into

Our team members are extremely passionate about the environment. So, we wanted to develop an app that encouraged sustainability. At the same time we wanted it to provide people with tangible, real-world benefits and also educate them. We also wanted to build an app with a clean design. All of this involved a lot of out-of-the-box thinking. Secondly, this was the first time we actually built an app using swift from scratch, that also integrated a real time database. This caused some challenges along the way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of building an application that could benefit people who want to grow indoor plants. We are also proud of our clean designs and straight-forward user interface.

What we learned

Firstly, we learned how to communicate and collaborate in a team, within a very short period of time. Determining how to divide tasks was tricky in the beginning, but as we delineated our project plan, tasks became easier to divide. We also learned how to build mobile applications with Swift and how to use Firebase. This encouraged us to learn more about mobile development and experiment with more tools.

What's next for Plant Keeper

First, Plant Keeper needs a map feature that could make it easier for users to find plant-keepers in their area. Second, we plan to add in-app messaging so as to simplify communication between plant keepers and those in need of plant keeping.