Making friends in college is hard enough, but making friends in college during a pandemic can be nearly impossible. Rahul Yedida, a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science, recognized this struggle and decided he wanted to use his computer science skills to create a solution: NearConnect.
According to Yedida, NearConnect is a social media platform that uses GPS and location services to allow the user to connect with anyone around them who has the app. Considering he’s had this idea in mind for a year and a half and been working on it since October, Yedida designed the app with a pre-COVID-19, technology-obsessed society in mind.
“This app helps people find other people now and, in a pre-COVID world, would help people make new friends,” Yedida said. “Especially when everybody’s sitting on their phones, and no one is really talking face to face anymore, like in a cafe setting.”
Yedida said he was hoping someone else would make the app before him, but no one did, so he did it himself. This may sound like a big feat, but it’s nothing new for him.
“What got me interested in coding in the first place was really just making things that were useful to me,” Yedida said. “As they got bigger and bigger, I figured they’d be useful for other people, so I began releasing them for free. If people use them, then sure.”
When in use, the app allows the user to find other people in their vicinity that have the NearConnect app and chat with them. If the conversation sticks, then the user can request to connect with the person they’re chatting with, allowing them to chat when no longer geographically close.
“The chat is only temporary,” Yedida said. “There’s no data being sent anywhere, and it’s very local in the sense that only people near you have access to that chat.”
However, this wasn’t the app’s original design. Originally, the app was simply a QR code that had all of the user’s contact information, Yedid said. As he developed it, Yedida worked his way to the current design and stuck with it, and that wasn’t the only problem he faced.
“I’ve never used Xcode or Swift before,” Yedida said. “Throughout the entire development process, I was kind of winging it. It’s really challenging when you’re trying to do something that nobody has really done before, and Swift is a newer language for iOS development, so there’s the challenge of libraries being not as mature as other languages.”
Currently, the app is only available for Apple devices, but Yedida has plans to offer it for Android as well.
“I’ve been looking at the developer docs to see how it might be implemented, and they do have something similar,” Yedida said. “Currently, it uses the same service as iPhones use to detect AirPods; when you open them, they instantly know that you have AirPods nearby. I’m not sure if Android has the exact same thing, but they do have something similar. I’m not sure if they’ll work together, but I guess the only way to do it is to make it and find out.”
Remarkably, this is just a hobby for Yedida. He enjoys making useful apps and specifically taking apps that already have alternatives and adding features that he or others want.
“Sometimes, I’ll make apps that do have alternatives, but there’s specific features that I want that don’t exist,” Yedida said. “Those apps tend to be closed-source, so you can’t just take them and build the features that you want.”
Yedida does want users or potential users to know that, like any other social app, the app only works when other people are also using it. The more people that use the app, the better the app and the experience for the users will become.
NearConnect is available on the app store for iOS devices.
