A cross-platform Flutter port of the "Friendly Eats" Firestore codelab.
This is the source code for the FlutterFire Friendly Eats codelab. It includes start and end versions of the required code.
Restaurant owners are trying to figure out ways to stay in business during the coronavirus pandemic, which has hammered their industry. However, it has hit Chinatown restaurants harder than others.
For one, the media and other political matters have perpetuated a sense of fear into the customers from entering Chinatowns amid the virus. Businesses within these areas have seen a decrease in customers from 70-80% and have began coming across major final restrictions. Although, visiting the plethora of options in Chinatowns is usually seen as a social event, what consumers have been longing for is the taste of Chinese delicacy that is not accessible elsewhere. We have seen a growing increase of restaurants in Chinatowns transitioning into having pick-up/delivery options. However, accessibility and reputation online has been a burden to these restaurants.
Many restaurants have had to close their doors to customers, while others have turned to food delivery apps to fill the void. Given that food delivery apps like GRUBHUB were charging restaurants 30% of each order and $9 or more on orders made using phone numbers on their app or website, restaurants wanting to leave the app have been imploring customers to help save the restaurant industry by ordering directly with the restaurant.
To help cut out the middleman food delivery app, we created Chinatown Eats.
Helps funnel money into Chinatown neighborhoods:
- Restaurants do not have to pay commissions to 3rd party apps like GrubHub or DoorDash
- Users can support local minority-owned businesses on multiple platforms (e.g. web, Facebook messenger, Slack)
- Restaurants can leverage technology offerings (e.g. DialogFlow can hold conversations in multiple languages)
We built our project using various Google product, including Cloud Firestore, Google Cloud Dialogflow, Flutter, and Dart.
We encountered issues installing Flutter permanently and then a hard crash that essentially wiped out the installation. We all were also in different timezones across the United States and even in India, so handing off next steps was a learning curve.
We learned to work with new technologies - many of them are our first time! We also had opportunities to mentor one another regardless of how much experience we have.
We learned that we can use jitsi for video conferencing, since there were issues using other common platforms. We also learned a lot of new technologies through working on this project, including some video creation and editing tools.
As for what’s next, we would like to continue to strive to make the application as communal and accessible, in order to create a platform that mimics similar characteristics to the way of life in Chinatowns. Our thoughts would be to implement translatability into our menu items in order for it to be understandable for all individuals. Moreover, new recommendation systems that utilize our past data inputs and user inputs into providing options that benefit both the customer and restaurant owners.
The possibilities are endless!