Daniel Chat: A messenger ahead of its time.
Overview
A couple years ago (2017), I took a summer course at my university on mobile app development for Android. The final project allowed us to pretty much create what ever we wanted as long as it hit a few required criteria which could be fulfilled by a very simple notepad clone app. The simple requirements were due to this being a summer course and a 48 hour time-frame. I luckily did not have anything going on during those 48 hours and wanted to really explore the depths of android development and rake in extra-credit points.
The idea
I decided on creating a mobile messaging app.The idea wasn't to novel, but that wasn't the point; I simply wanted to see what it would take to create an elementary implementation of facebook messenger.
Data management
All my database management and account data was handled by firebase. The seamless integration into android and google's pre-built authentication services for account security made it a no-brainer design choice for my first crack at a project of this scale. Upon registration each user was assigned a unique ID by google. This string of characters was used to associate everything with a particular individual; whether it be friends or chat conversations.
Design
User Interaction
The most naive approach to adding a friend would be to type in a buddy's unique ID, but this was simply not a very Cash-Money experience.
The best solutions are the ones that are so simple and quick that a user wouldn't even notice. To add friends I encoded an individual's unique ID into a QR code, so a friend would have to just scan a buddy's QR code. Upon success the app will play an audio sound bit of DJ Khaled saying, "Another one".
Final Thoughts
Back in 2017 we were still adding Facebook friends by searching for them by name in the Facebook app and then switching to the Facebook Messaging app to talk. I'm not saying that my messaging app was better than Facebook's offering with an easier way to add friends and a common sense approach to not harvesting user data and selling it. But it was able to accomplish what Facebook began only offering late last year, and all with a superlative UI.