The problem Alohomora solves

The past year or so has been very tough for the entire year with Covid-19 grounding us in our homes. Many people lost their jobs, many face the threat of losing them in the future. Despite all the hardships, we still were able to see various small-scale businesses spawn up. Be that setting up a business at home to online sales, people made utmost use of different technologies to scale up their business for the long-term goal. Observing this and leveraging this wave of new potential business, we came up with the idea of Alohomora (a doorway which opens different possibilities for new small scale business to scale and reach new heights).

Challenges we ran into

So far the biggest challenge we faced during the development process was to have a consistent and modern UI. Along with this, keeping the UI minimal and planning it in such a way that the users (especially the sellers) don’t get overwhelmed with the various different features that we have. The solution (a quick time one) that we came up with was, integrating designs that the people are familiar with along with a design language that is unique to us. For example, we have the main feed which is similar to Instagram but with our design language and colour scheme with additional features. The chat is similar to WhatsApp but with minor tweaks and the addition of features such as bargaining of prices, etc.

Speaking from the development perspective, setting up the project for an efficient and seamless development process was a challenging one. We integrated Git and GitHub features heavily and plans to use other features such as GitHub Actions, Releases, Issue/PR Templates, Workflows, etc.

The next major challenge was Flutter state management. State Management can easily get tricky and for a project of this scale, proper state management is required. We used Bloc for state management in Flutter. Flutter recently had a major update release, Flutter 2.0. Getting onboard these various features introduced by Flutter was a challenge in itself.

We also had a discussion regarding whether we should opt for a server or serverless architecture. After a few discussions, we decided on going serverless with Firebase Cloud Functions since we already were heavily relying on other Firebase Products.

We wanted to build a web app as well but couldn't furnish it so well because of time constraints.