MyPeepz

BUSINESS REQUIREMENT

Our Client wanted to make a free location-based social network and social discovery app for Android and iOS that helps to find people nearby you and who share your background like race-ethnicity etc. Whether living or travelling abroad, you can find, share and connect with people that come from the same country or region or people who shared your culture.

CHALLENGES

• Monitoring users’ current location accurately at regular intervals while maintaining better battery life.
• Reduce the complexities for filtering by nearby users, flags and regions with certain rules.
• Implement real-time chat for connected users and notification delivery.
• Share posts to other external apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. Shared content has to include the app logo watermarked over it.
• Play the video from YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion, and have a dedicated native video upload and streaming facility.
• Lazy load and play gif images on demand without putting large consumption of mobile data.
• Search for users/flags/cities with an indexed search service.

SOLUTIONS

• Integrated fused location service in Android and the Core Location framework in iOS to find the user’s current location and to combine different types of location information available.
• The challenge of reducing the time taken for filtering users and posts was addressed by implementing prefetching and caching.
• Real-time chat was implemented using GCM push messages in both android and iOS apps.
• Integrated the Facebook Graph SDK for login and sharing posts to Facebook.
• Integrated Embed video URL with webView for Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion separately.
• Integrated popular video libraries and CDN-like video repositories for video upload and streaming.
• Lucene, Solr, and MongoDB are employed to take care of search and autocomplete needs.

IMPACT

• Created a platform that enables people to share photos, GIFs, videos, location, any links, ideas and interests with their connected friends and get notified when watchers like, comment or reply to their posts.
• View personalised feeds based on location, flag or his/her watchers.
• The app allows posting feeds as a visitor to other country feeds.
• Share posts to Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and other social networking apps instantly.
• Share videos from Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion or from device gallery to app.
• Real-time chatting with friends.

KEY TECHNOLOGIES

• MongoDB
• Android/iOS
• Java 7
• Google GCM/OpenFire
• Dropwizard
• Lucene