Munch

Inspiration

Hanging out with friends is an essential part of life to destress and build social connections. However, when trying to get food with friends, we are always indecisive and can never agree on a location. This app helps face that problem by letting everyone voice their option freely. It also allows for the discovery of great local places!

What it does

This is an iPhone app that everyone can enjoy with its intuitive design. It starts with a user logging in with a Google account using Google auth. This streamlines the process and ensures better security. It is then driven by what we have coined as circles. This is your group of friends you are going to vote with. It will prompt you to create a circle or to join one with a code. If you are creating a circle, a code will be generated. This has a share feature to make it easily accessible to all your friends. It shows you as they join, and you can decide on the location you want to search for after everyone is in; it's time to swipe! Inspired by Tinder, all the restaurants in the area are shown with a star rating. You swipe right or heart the ones you like/ would want to go to and left/ press x for the ones you don't. At the end, it ranks them among all your friends so you can find you guys top pick and Munch!

How we built it

In building this app, collaboration was at the forefront. We brainstormed ideas and then compiled a list of features. Integrating dev-ops like GitHub allowed for group collaboration with ease. We set up a group repository and built out the basic UI for the app in X-code. Once we started having the skeleton in place, we filled it out by implementing a backend hosted on Firebase. We used Firestorm as the database behind and custom APIs to scrape the information from Google Places.

Challenges we ran into

We decided to be ambitious and try to learn something new from this hackathon. Going into this, none of us knew SwiftUI, which is the language to create native Apple apps. This led to many challenges, but by working together and dividing up the features, we were able to finish our app. With it being a full stack application with a compiled front end, a Firebase backend, a Firestore database, and costume APIs connecting it all, we also ran into many issues integrating everything together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of our new skills in Swift and Apple app development. It's very rewarding to have your first full-stack app created. Creating an app that we can use to bring us closer together and focus on in-person social time is also very rewarding.

What we learned

From this, we learned a ton about IOS app development and full-stack development. The biggest takeaway, however, is time management and collaboration. This project would not have been possible without every single teammate. It was also great to bond and learn about everyone while working together.

What's next for Munch

Up next for Munch is broadening the options. Expanding this to movies and other things like it would be great. We all would love more time to perfect the design and user experience. Lastly, it would be nice to experiment with other APIs if we had a budget that allowed for it.

Built With

• firebase
• firestore
• github
• google-auth
• google-places
• swift
• swiftui
• xcode