REITEN

Garvit Agarwal
MDG Space
Published in
4 min readFeb 19, 2020

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Introduction

REITEN is a German word for ‘ride.’ It is an app that I developed as a project for the Season of Code organized by MDG. This app introduces a new e-rickshaw booking platform for college campuses.

What is REITEN?

This app solves the problem of transportation on campus. It will provide a platform for rickshaw drivers. At times, we all have faced the difficulty of not getting a rickshaw while being at the hospital, the departments, etc. This app will solve this problem.

My project consists of two apps, one for driver and other for customers. I implemented OTP verification using Firebase, along with country code picker to choose the country code of different countries. . I have also applied a resend OTP option after 30 seconds. For Driver App, Google maps fragment has been used to show the current location, controlled by the action of the switch. PolyLine Options are deployed to draw path up to the destination entered in the search box and responsive to the location of the driver. I have used Firebase cloud messaging for communication between the driver app and the Customer app.

When the customer books the driver, a dialog box is displayed with accepting and cancel button. On Accepting, it will load the map fragment and start google map intent for navigation. On canceling, it will notify the customer that the driver has canceled the request. This is controlled by Firebase Cloud Messaging. For the Customer App, Geofire and Geoquery have been implemented to load all the nearby drivers. I have used Google Place Picker API to select Pickup and Drop Location. The Book Driver button will alert the driver with a dialog box for approval.

Benefits

It will help the drivers by fetching customers 🤑. On-campus, it will help them to get customers when they are at a place where no customer is coming. It will help students by reducing the problem of the non-availability of e-rickshaw at some places on the campus.😃

Inspiration

I got this idea after facing the difficulty of the nonavailability of e-rickshaw at certain places on campus during my initial stay at IIT Roorkee. Moreover, I saw other cab services like ola and uber are not efficiently deployed in Roorkee. I thought my app could improve the condition.😎

Experience During SoC

Season of Code(SoC) was a three-month-long development competition organized by the Mobile Development Group(MDG).

My experience was amazing. I learned a lot during the period of 3 months. It was just like a mock GSoC. It helped me to discover my interest in app development. I explored the use of google maps in android development.

Challenges Faced

The biggest challenge was that Google Maps API is paid now. So I have to cut down features and depend on other methods to deploy them. 😥

Future Goals

I have an idea of making it open source so that any organization can use it. They can modify it according to their use. 😊This can be used by any college campus, and moreover, it can be put into use in any city where app cab services are not available.

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