The problem Flowtify solves

Flowtify solves the problem of the lack of a notification mechanism within the Flow ecosystem. Currently, users, developers, and smart contracts on Flow have limited visibility and rely solely on events and updates. This hinders efficient collaboration and decision-making.

Flowtify addresses this problem by providing instant email notifications, ensuring prompt and reliable information delivery to participants. By tightly integrating with the Flocial protocol, which is a social networking protocol for flow, Flowtify retrieves relevant profile data and delivers notifications in real time.

Other dAppps can leverage Flowtify's publicly available API to seamlessly integrate notifications into their dApps or manually trigger notifications from Flowtify's dApp as needed. This improves the user experience, enhances communication, and enables timely responses to critical activities within the Flow ecosystem.

We also improve discoverability by providing the ability to search for users by username, wallet address, or even full name, Flowtify makes it easier to find and connect with specific users on the Flow blockchain. This feature streamlines user engagement and improves communication within the Flow ecosystem.

We had a talk with flow developers regarding some problems they face & dev tools they need. One of these problems was a major inspiration behind building Flowtify. Currently, there's no notification mechanism for approval requests of multi-sig/auth transactions. This causes delays in approval and hence is very inefficient. Flowtify offers a solution for this, In the future, the developers/approvers would be specifically tagged on Flocial and hence sending notification to approvers would be very easy. This is just one ideal use-case for flowtify! There're many more

Challenges we ran into

1. Flowtify is built on top of the Flocial Protocol (another project of ours). So we had to build Flocial before starting Flowtify. Hence we had less time for this project and wrapped it in 2 days. However, we had the email job ready beforehand so we built it in time. Flowtify is also a brilliant use case of Flocial!

2. Learning Cadence: As it was our first time writing Cadence code, we faced a steep learning curve in understanding the language and its syntax. We encountered challenges in grasping the unique aspects of Cadence and ensuring our code followed best practices. However, we embraced this opportunity to expand our skills and enjoyed the learning process, gradually becoming proficient in Cadence development.

3. Problems in finding emailing solutions - We tried a lot of solutions for emailing notifications. We started by integrating node-emailer and it successfully worked for mailing to one person but threw errors when multiple addresses were added. Next, we tried running our own SMTP server but we failed. Finally, we had to completely redo our integration and we opted for send-in-blue as the email provider which was a cheap solution. We successfully integrated it and it worked for multiple email addresses.