Ring Tavern

Share your contact info with your inner ring, or the world at large. Ring Tavern lets you control what information is shared with who.

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Inspiration

These days, everyone has accounts on a million platforms. It's hard to keep track of where your friends are, and keep people updated if you switch accounts. There are some existing attempts to manage this such as https://linktr.ee/, but they typically make all information public. We wanted to create a system for some people to know our latest phone number, and some people to just know our Twitter handle.

What it does

Ring Tavern is a two-way contact manager app where users can share their names, addresses, phone numbers, social media accounts, etc. Users can follow anyone to get publicly available information about them. But that user will have to specifically add them to a smaller ring for more sensitive information to be shared.

How we built it

Ring Tavern is a React Native mobile app built using the Expo framework. We used Google's Firebase for the database backend. Some additional libraries such as React Native Paper helped with the UI styling.

Challenges we ran into

Firebase's NoSQL database was a bit tricky to get our heads around, especially as we had to carefully consider security rules to prevent accessing sensitive data. We had prior experience with more standard SQL, but Firebase's mindset is very different.

Integrating Firebase and React Native also proved challenging due to the lifecycle methods not meshing perfectly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have completed a fairly feature rich mobile app in just a weekend! All the core features work well: signing in, editing your contact info, adding people, and viewing their contact info. We're also very happy with our theming; the app and the rings are inspired by the idea of meeting people in a tavern in a game like DnD.

What we learned

  • How to use React Native (entirely new for one dev, limited experience for the other)
  • How to use Firebase as a secure database background
  • How to use TypeScript to reduce errors in JS development

What's next for Ring Tavern

We think the core idea of Ring Tavern could be very useful, and are interested in building an expanded version. We have ideas for features including sharing interests and finding times to meet up with people.

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