App Development Goals and Hardships

     My goal throughout this year is to develop an application for athletes where they are able to find and plan games, practices, meetups with other local athletes. I would also like the app to include health information and tips for each sport. With this being said, I am still in the early stages of creating the app due to still being very novice at coding and having to learn how to plan and design the user interface, how to incorporate different locations similar to how Pokemon Go has "PokeStops". 

    This week, I decided to research on what it takes to develop an app and figure out the things that I would need to learn and understand before I could even start coding. According to an article by Mona Joorabchi, Ali Mesbah, and Philippe Krutchen, I would have to decide what platform I would like to create the application on. They stated that the three categories for mobile apps are native, web-based, and hybrid. I think the application that I am looking to build would serve best as a mobile application that works off the native operating systems of each device. 


    I am currently at the planning and research stage in my app development. A few other apps that it is going to take inspiration from is Uber, Pokemon Go, and Reddit. The main goal is to have the application there so players are able to easily find local players if they are looking for a game whether it's in 30 minutes or if they want to plan it days in advanced. This is one reason why the app is going to take inspiration from Reddit. Players will be able to make accounts and via the accounts, they are able to make forum-like posts about looking for a game. Below is a very basic and barebones idea of what the app would look like.

    In the way that I want it to take inspiration from Uber would be their rating system. I want to allow the users who accepted an request to join to rate the player that joined. They'll be able to rate it off of multiple things like friendliness, teamwork, correct skill level, etc. so that future players will be able to know if they even want that person to join. This is under the impression that having a rating tied to your account will reduce toxicity and provide a better overall playing experience for everyone. 

    Lastly, I want to have the app take inspiration from Pokemon Go with their idea of using landmarks as PokeStops. This could be implemented into my app using gyms and local parks as landmarks. Users will be able to click on the landmarks and either post that their looking for a game in the near future and have players request that way or players can look for games in their local areas. As a side note, the sports will not just be the most popular ones like basketball and football, but it will include all sports like volleyball, soccer, tennis, badminton, boxing, etc. 

    According to the article above, I do have a lot of hardships in front of me especially considering my lack of experience and knowledge. They mention that for an application similar to what I am doing that has a constant flow of data, it cannot be stored all in one place so I will have to create a cloud connection to sync up the information quickly. Another issue that they brought up is that I will have to be able to test the application for each platform separately. The operating systems for Android and Apple are fairly different so I will have to be able to code the app to work on both OS but also make sure they are compatible with each other. 

    Despite all of these hardships, I have a good idea of what my goals are for the application. I believe that the application will help bring the community together and help each sport grow in their own sense locally. 


References

Joorabchi, M. E., Mesbah, A., & Krutchen, P. (n.d.). Real Challenges in Mobile App Development. Retrieved February 11, 2022, from https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.724.2463&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Comments

  1. EricaFebruary 11, 2022 at 10:45 AM

    Andre,

    What an exciting project idea and very nicely written blog. Can't wait to see your work progress!

    ReplyDelete

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