FreeStuff

Instead of throwing stuff away, give to others with minimal effort. Our app is a great way of helping the community, no matter where you are.

Comment 1

Inspiration

We think that people throw stuff out too often. Somebody's trash is nearly always another person's treasure. Instead of sending something to the landfill, why not send it to Lan or Phil? America's Research Group found that around 18% of people in the United States shopped at thrift stores during a year. This equals about 59 million Americans. Assuming the statistics are the same in every other part of the world as well, 18% is about 1.3 billion people! Our app works all over the world, so it will help make a lot of lives easier!

Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/thrift-store-day.html

What it does

After easily signing into an account via Google, the users of our app can create a listing of an item that they would like to give away, and the locations of the items are displayed on a map and in a list for other users to see. If somebody desires an item and wants to pick it up, then they can select that item in the item details page (after clicking an item), and immediately get directions to go pick it up with one click. This app is address-free, and the pins are precise latitude-longitude coordinates, so the user does not have to get bogged down with remembering zip codes or city names, which can be obtained anyways when Google translates the coordinates into an address in the Maps app.

How we built it

We used Android Studio to build the Android app, and we did our programming in Java (rather than Kotlin). We used Gradle to build the project, Firebase Cloud Storage to store the images for the listings, Firebase Realtime Database to store the data for the listings and users, and Firebase Auth to authenticate the user via Google. We also needed a Google API key in order to put map fragments and widgets in our application.

Challenges we ran into

We worked across different time zones (three of us were on the east coast of the United States, and one of us was in India!), so despite one of us always being awake, which seems like an advantage, everyone else was sleeping so there was little to no communication during that time. Also, like anybody else at the hackathon, we had a time constraint, and many features we wanted to implement ended up getting the boot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all got along perfectly, and enjoyed working with each other, so there was no friction between team members. We also made a great user interface together, and got a lot of the desired functionality implemented.

What we learned

As said above, we planned too many things that would take too much time to do, and ended up scrapping various "extras" after we started to incorporate them into the user interface, so we learned that perhaps we should estimate how much time we have to complete all of the planned things before jumping into them. In addition, of course, we also learned a ton about the different technologies of the project and each of us improved our Android skills this weekend.

What's next for FreeStuff

  • User ratings (to ensure the integrity of the transactions)
  • User points (to further encourage people to give)
  • A more detailed profile page (with previous transactions)
  • Item history (so users can find items they viewed and forgot about)
Share this project:

Updates