HOU$E

HOU$E is a group-living mobile app designed with group customization in mind. It primarily revolves around splitting costs for financial items but also has optional widgets for chores and other tasks.

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We were inspired to build this application based on personal roommate strife. Especially as engineers, we've found it difficult to manage shared assets and costs such as rent and common space consumables (i.e. paper towels, trash bags, shared food items, etc.) without going down a rabbit hole of numerous Venmo exchanges. Too many times have the non-confrontational and/or passive individuals gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to asking their roommate to pitch in for more dish soap. HOU$E solves this by combining an expense tracker with shopping lists and other potential widgets to ease this process. The idea is that at the end of every month, the app automatically takes into account all the individual expenses and applies any weights as needed (such as different rent amounts). It then compiles it down into the fewest transactions between people to balance out accounts.

We built this using the Kivy framework which allows you to develop applications easily with Python. Kivy provides application support for multiple platforms, but for this project, we focused on Android. The Atom code editor was used to code collaboratively. Balsamiq was used to help plan out the initial UI for our app, and Clip Studio Paint was then used to decide the color palette for the application as well as to make all the individual assets such as the logo, avatars, etc.

First and foremost when it comes to challenges - we bit off more than we could chew and one of our main coders was green when it came to Hackathons (it's ok, we still love them). We had to spend a significant amount of time learning the Kivy framework so we weren't able to use it to its full potential within the time allotted for this hackathon. Another unforeseen, but not as the major, issue was syncing through Atom's teletype feature - it would occasionally boot off one of the coders during live collaboration.

At the end of the day, we learned a lot about Kivy, Balsamiq, and Python in regards to mobile app development. Our graphics designer was able to learn about vector graphics so that our visual components would look good if we decided to pivot towards a cross-platform mobile and web app.

Something that we are proud of is that we were able to get an app that opens! We are also pretty proud of our concept still and the UI that we developed through Balsamiq as it helped us visualize what we were ultimately aiming for towards the end game.

Moving forward, the developers behind HOU$E are hoping to get the support needed to continue working on this app for publication - barring that there is enough interest from external parties. This application would be beneficial, not just for the typical house of non-family college students, but for those that may be more passive and not as confrontational about these financial burdens, and we hope that the judges are able to see this value as well.

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