Inspiration
During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we heard about a lot of restaurants opting out of food delivery services because of the following reasons:
- The applications charge too much to restaurants so restaurants have minimum earnings whatever they are selling.
- Too many drivers come and go to the food places which can create more contamination. 3.One of the major delivery services pulled out of the country with $4.7 million in debt and their delivery people just unionized their jobs.
- The gig applications is a kind of cut real social interaction between restaurants and drivers so it can bring the "driver" title back to job market instead of a generic "gig job" title.
So we decided to conceive the idea of an app that could provide safety in the food delivery job market for drivers, as well as peace of mind for customers ordering from the service, that their food is 100% clean.
What it does
[Version 1] Drivers can list their profiles and availability on the application.
[Version 1] Restaurants can pull that driver information from the application and call the driver to work with them. restaurants.
How we built it
We developed the first prototype of the application using Android Studio utilizing the Java programming language. We implemented various built-in libraries of the language, including the file IO library and regex used for username and password validation.
Challenges we ran into
Caglar: Creating CRUD operation with MongoDB unrelated with Android Studio.
Jerry: The login algorithm was originally supposed to store the information of a driver in an array ie a string array containing the username, password, email, phone number, address, etc. And a 2-dimensional array would be used to store those arrays as a list of accounts. However, I ran into some errors such as variables not being initialized at the right time, NullPointerExceptions, etc. As a result of being extremely sleep deprived over the course of the day (I was up until 4 am), the page that is shown after the login screen is a dummy profile page showing a sample profile. Also, one member on the team couldn't get Android Studio to run the project code, so the development process was slowed down dramatically, giving less time to implement more ideas.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Caglar: We tried developing a website for the project too; understanding MongoDB and NodeJS and how middlewares work on NodeJS
Jerry: The account creation page; I was able to recreate a typical signup process using industry-standard validation techniques to check the validity of emails, passwords, and usernames given by a specific user.
What I learned
Developing a project in a team requires a more diverse skill set than the one our team had. All four of our members had a background in computer science and engineering, and we could have used some skills in digital marketing and graphic design fields for better marketing. Because we lacked this, the video demonstration of the app is quite boring, and there aren't many exciting elements to the app; it's a pretty boring user interface (modern, but boring).
What's next for YellowPAP
[Version 2] A working login page is implemented complete with cloud-based account information storage (google cloud services), as well as a working activity to find nearby restaurants needing deliveries to be made (utilizing the google maps API + a shortest distance algorithm implementation). A more lively and attractive user interface could also be implemented as a consequence of this prototype.
[Version 2] The program only assigns selected 5 restaurants to the driver from their area so the drivers will have an actual connection with the restaurant. The reason being is so that in case the driver or restaurant staff are infected by a virus of some sort, there are two cases: If the driver is tested positive by some means, the restaurants the driver is affiliated with will be notified to not allow that driver to make further deliveries until they recover. If restaurant staff at a particular affiliated restaurant tests positive, the driver will be immediately notified via the app, and will be given protocols for the necessary precautions such as the need for PPE.
[Version 2] Add a feature for customer registration and login.
[Version 2] The only consideration of the user becoming a driver and endorse the restaurants is that they work more according to how many more deliveries need to be done.
[Version 2] Drivers can invite other drivers to assist them if they are overwhelmed with the order numbers.
[Version 3] The drivers can earn an extra percentage of their pay based on how much the drivers invited to assist them make on their own deliveries.
[Version 3] The drivers will have an actual business running for them (YelloPAP) so that they can build and collaborate with the restaurants and sell their business to other drivers if they don't want to continue their driver business.
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