When Apperture started as a PennApps hackathon project almost a year ago, Charlie Cheever was promoting his new platform Expo.io (a free, open-source development layer on top of React Native) during the event and encouraged everyone to give it a try. And although we developed our first prototype with Expo, we drifted away from it due to crucial unsupported features and the platform simply being at its very beginnings.
Even at the time, we had a bold and innovative idea that we knew had a great potential and just needed to be implemented correctly. We saw a need for a seamless photo sharing experience for friend groups: Bluetooth and Airdrop were fast and simple but they were limited to one-to-one sharing, Google Photos, and Google Drive required everyone to have a Google account and to go through the long process of setting up an sharing an album between the collaborators, other group chat apps such as GroupMe and Whatsapp simply were not designed for collaborative photo sharing. …
