Quirky alternative to apartment security management apps

Gated communities in Pune have grown in the last decade and so has the crime. These communities rely on the better judgments of security guards who work in shifts and many a times are unable to distinguish between residents and outsiders. Hence nowadays societies are working towards becoming digital and in doing so have created a market for visitor management softwares.
There are plenty of apps and web applications in the market that provide plethora of features not limited to apartment security management system. These apps boast features like vendor and tenant management, digital notice boards and in many cases review boards of domestic helps working in the premises etc.
These softwares are in the market for more than an year now, so you must be envisioning these futuristic complexes those use them with hoverboards and stuff, right? Wrong, in fact they are far from it, none of these applications are used to their fullest potential. But then why pay for the additional features you may ask. The answer is simple, It’s because these complexes/societies have a huge amount of funds and they can afford it. But these apps comes with fine prints, and you should always read through these. There is always a possibility of data security breaches with these service providers. Ever wondered why all of a sudden you started receiving promotional sms or email after visiting a friends house last night which had one of these apps securing the complex? I wonder it myself sometimes.
So assume you are a resident of one such society or complex which is not fortunate enough to have funds for such “hi-tech” apps or for any such reasons and want to build one yourself. So I decided to find a frugal solution for you, that would works as good as any of these apps but addressed the following main points:
- Setup cost: These apps cost on an average of Rs.8 to Rs.15 per person per month per flat excluding the cost of the devices. The devices could be rented from them or purchased from them. So for a complex with around 500 flats with 2 gates could cost around —
Service Cost : Rs. 48,000/- (considering the lowest Rs. 8)
Device Cost: 3 Devices (considering the society logs entries of club house etc.) : Rs. 30,000/- approx.
Total: Rs. 78,000/- first year then Rs.48,000 per year. - Ease of use and access: All of these apps need to be downloaded that means another app that you are going to use sparingly, but still takes up precious space on your device and if it’s the one that is poorly developed and maintained then say bye bye to your phones precious memory as well.
- Data is precious: Why would you like a third party run analysis on your spending habits? (How many times did swiggy deliver you food this month or how many myntra parcels you received this month). Data collection from these complexes are not meant to be used for advertisement or promotions. They are meant for security audits and other legal matters. The data should be used by the registered society just for that and no other third party should have access to it.
Solution
Hosting and Database: For it I first decided to go for Google Cloud Platform for hosting the data and scripts as google offered me a signup credit of $250. Well once I started looking into it, I realised that I didn’t need the enterprise level features for such a tiny app. Upon further study I narrowed it down to Firebase-a google service. It had everything I needed for the app and it was basically a subset of GCP features. Cost wise my solution could be run on their free tier and would easily scale for 500 users or even more. That would bring my service cost to Rs. 0/- and my total cost to a one time Rs. 30,000/- approx.(Device Cost)
Technology: I needed two apps, one for the Security gates to add entry exit logs. Another one for the residents to approve or reject the entry requests.
For the security gate app, I decided to build a Progressive web app using ReactJS.
It solved two problems:
- Building an app and registering with app stores costs money! But a PWA doesn’t need an app store. It works like any other native app by simply adding itself to your phones home screen by visiting the apps web url (But works offline as well). You can read more about PWA here.
- I didn’t want to learn native app development as it would have took me longer than my 30 Day target.
So I used ReactJS for the front end, Firebase Auth for SMS authentication and Firebase CloudStore with Firebase Cloud functions as the application backend.
I was amazed when I learnt that SMS verification could be a free service. Firebase auth allows you 10K phone authentication per month in its free tier post that it charge $0.01/verification i.e. 70 paise/verification.
With TailwindCSS, I was quickly able to build the app in 2 days time with a very basic UI.


For the next part, I did not wanted residents to have to download a dedicated app even if it was a PWA. So I went back to the drawing boards and realized that people still relied on social networking apps like whatsapp to discuss society related activities and complaints etc. despite of the apps the society had purchased.
So I decided why not leverage such apps, which are maintained by big tech giants and thousands of developers and are accepted by people. So I chose slack for my little project as it was free and had amazing documentation on using it’s APIs.
Plus it solved another problem:
Whatsapp is great but I noticed, people create their own groups and sub groups and you end up getting added to not just one group but several other groups. It becomes really hard to keep track of these groups getting mixed up between your personal messages.
Slack on the other hand improves communication by creating channels, you could enable notifications only when someone mentions you ( trust me I wish whatsapp had this feature for groups). But overall it gets easier to onboard new residents and tenants to slack using it’s apis (Juice for another post). Unlike the other apps, where only one family member could approve or reject the entry requests, now any of the family member could approve or reject the request from anywhere in the world. So I extended my Firebase Cloud functions to post a notification whenever there was a entry request created for a particular flat.


Slack has all the features or means for you to create similar experience that the apps in question provide. One could raise complaints directly from the slack channels using forms.


These forms could be used for so many other events like Society meeting RSVPs or other slack features could be used for polls etc. It also comes with an ability to build chatbots! Imagine have to wait for hours before someone replied you with contact details of Internet service provider in your complex. Instead you could just do this:

Well these are just few of the unlimited possibilities. Please share your ideas, suggestions and comments.
