Squad: Photo Sharing App.
Join, Click and Sit back.
History
Little story time. Got this idea sitting in my Theory of Computation class. Spolier Alert! Yes I got a ‘C’ and barely made it.
A batch-mate of mine was telling me how he was working on some facial recognition system for attendance system and was gonna pitch to college authorities. I was wondering where else could it be put to use in. What easier than a photo sharing app. I came up with a basic structure of the app (which I’ll discuss below) and a few friends pitched in with their ideas and there we had the founding team of ‘SQUAD’. Shout out to @Prerit, who was handling our web app and @Vibha our UI/UX Designer. Other two shall remain nameless for undisclosed reasons.
We came up with a prototype which we never launched. But hey, here is our landing page that my man @Prerit spun up. The design credits go to @Vibha, obviously.
IDEA
SQUAD is a photo-sharing app that makes it easy to manage, share, and enjoy photos. With its cloud-based storage and one-click synchronization, you can share photos in any event.
Flow
Create an event with an approximate timeline for it to start
Invite your friends to join
Get a reminder for the event
Toggle on to allows us to track photos. Toggle off the event otherwise
Click and sit back. As long as the photos are saved in your device’s gallery it will be uploaded to a common shared album on our cloud accessible to all your friends in that event
Problem
We took a survey which was filled by 277 people ( not a lot I know but good enough to start) and we noticed approximately 90% of the people used only WhatsApp or Google Drive to share photos. Don’t get me wrong these are great apps, but honestly I don’t think these are the best apps to solve the GenZ photo sharing crisis.
WhatsApp
Doesn’t allow to share more than 30 photos at once
Decreases photo quality
Have to wait for that one busy friend to upload the photos they took from their Iphone
Google Drive
Tedious steps to filter and upload photos to album
High chances of duplicates as people might upload same photos they shared personally
And again, that one friend :)
According to our survey, the most highlighted pain points were as above.
If you wish to be a part of this ever running survey, go ahead. Fill survey here.
System Design
Architecture Overview
Client-Server Architecture: The app will use a client-server model where the client-side is a mobile app (iOS and Android), and the server-side consists of a cloud-based backend.
Cloud Storage: Utilize cloud services (e.g., AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage) for storing photos.
Database: Use a NoSQL database (e.g., MongoDB, Firebase Firestore) for user data, event information, and metadata.
Backend Framework: Use a framework like Node.js or Django to handle API requests, authentication, and business logic.
Real-Time Communication: Implement real-time features using WebSockets or Firebase Realtime Database for instant updates.
Key Components
User Experience
Focus on a clean, user-friendly design.
Easy navigation with clear call-to-action buttons.
Fast and reliable photo uploads.
Simple access to shared albums and event details.
Challenges
The first and foremost thing we realised is that for this app to become something, it has to blow up in the GenZ market. The social media marketing has to be rock solid and it should spread through word of mouth.
The second point, and the reason for not taking it up ahead was not finding an efficient business model. We came up with several freemium models, but I could not see it scaling well.
Competitors
There are no direct competitors with the same model that we found. But Apps in the same space include Whatsapp, Google Photos, Instagram, Snapchat.