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MusicBuddies​ 
 
Find Friends Based On Your Music Taste

CS591: Android App Development

PROJECT OVERVIEW

My Contribution

Android App Developer​​

  • Implemented Spotify API and Spotify Feature of the app that allows users to play, skip next, skip previous of songs in the playlist they entered

  • Implemented the hamburger / sliding menu

  • Front-end polishment

  • Created the French and Chinese Version of the app

  • Wireframes for the app

Project Size

Team of 5 for 4 weeks​​

  • Xuanyu (Sophie) Huang - Developer

  • Kelsey Myton - Developer

  • Mingzhe (Peter) Huang - Developer

  • Mia Szela - Developer

Technology

Android Studio, Firebase, Spotify SDK, Youtube API, Figma

Language

Java

Course

CS591: Android App Development

Project Link

INTRODUCTION

*Music Buddies is an app that allows you to find friends based on your music taste. It is a project created for my android development course.

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Having a night in listening to music, driving around blasting your favorite songs, and having dance parties in between hours of studying are some of the best bonding activities someone can do. Sharing music with one another that you all genuinely enjoy is extremely hard to come by! It’s really difficult to find someone with the same music taste as you! 

 

MusicBuddies makes it much easier to find new friends that have a similar music taste to you. This app even makes it easier to connect with people and learn about other music as well. However a user may choose, they try to match with anyone they might want to connect with via music! 

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APP OVERVIEW

  • Similar to Tinder/ Bumble, you can swipe right to like and you will be able to chat with them. 

  • On the swipe page, you will be able to see and play other users’ Spotify playlist and Youtube playlist.

  • Sign in / sign up for an account

  • On the preferences page, you can filter (by gender and music genre) the kind of users you wish to see on the swipe page.

  • On the settings page, you can delete your account.

  • Locales: We have the Chinese and French version of our app as well.

 
 

FUNCTIONALITIES & FEATURES

Splash

  • When you first open the app there will be a splash screen with our logo that will last for a while and then it will go to the sign in/ sign up page.

 
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Hamburger / Slidable Menu​

  • This is where you can navigate to other pages. Click the hamburger menu in the top left hand corner of any page to see this menu.

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Note:

Since this is an android development course, we didn't have much time to focus on the UX design.

 

As a team, we created the UX design wireframes together on Figma before we started coding.

 

The screenshots you see here are not wireframes, but actual results of the coding (from Android Studio's Emulator).

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Sign in / sign up

  • First, click the sign up button to create an account. Enter the requested information and hit sign up. ​

  • The app will then take you to your profile page, where you can set your profile initially.

    • You can upload a picture of yourself from your photo library.​

    • You can choose your gender, birthday, and favorite genre.

    • You can enter your favorite artist and a bio where you can share extra information about yourself.

  • Next, you can add your Spotify and Youtube playlists for others to enjoy.

    • To find your Spotify playlist, go to the Spotify app and sign in. You can search for a playlist or find a playlist from your library. Click on the playlist, then click the 3 dots, then click the share button and lastly click copy link. Paste the link into our app.

    • To find a YouTube playlist, go to the youtube app or website on your phone and navigate to your playlists or search a playlist that you really like. Click the share button and copy the link provided. Paste this link into our app and click confirm. 

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Find Buddies

  • This is the first page you will reach once you’ve logged in. Click on the hamburger menu icon to navigate the app’s pages.

  • Swipe right to like the profile you see. 

  • Swipe left to see the next user on this page. 

  • When you leave this page, the matches refresh. They are not saved and therefore you will be able to see a user again after you have swiped on them.

  • Press "Playlists" to see a certain user's playlist, and you can choose to play their Spotify or Youtube Playlist.

  • For both Spotify and Youtube playlists, you'd be able to skip to the next song or go back to the previous song in the playlist.

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Chats

  • This page is divided into two tabs: the “matches” tab and the “chats” tab

    • “Matches” Tab:

      • Here you’ll see people that you’ve matched with; they won’t show up in the chats tab until you chat with them.

      • You can click any user to chat with.

    • “Chats” Tab:

      • Here you’ll see people that you have already chatted with.

      • We have a real-time chat function so graders can use two devices and create two accounts and experience the real-time chat function.

    • You can swipe between 2 tabs.

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Edit Profile

  • This is similar to setting up a profile. All of your previous information is there and you can edit it. Click the confirm button at the bottom to save your changes.

Settings

  • The user can “delete account” and a warning message will pop-up and you’d have to click “confirm” to actually delete your account.

  • The user can choose to “log out.” If they do so they will be taken back to the sign in/ sign up page.

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Edit Preferences

  • It says “I would like to meet...” meaning you can adjust what kind of users you’d like to see on the “Find Buddies” page.

  • For example, if you choose “female” for gender. You will only see female profiles on the swipe page. And if you choose “female” and “country” for music genre and press confirm, there will only be female profiles who chose “country” as their favorite music genre.

preferences.gif

REFLECTION

 

Process:

  • We started by researching the APIs that we would use for the app. I was responsible for implementing features using the Spotify SDK for Android. As we researched, our professor decided that it would be a good idea to turn this into a project. Thus, we had to come up with an app idea using the APIs we were researching including the Spotify API, Youtube API, and Firebase. Eventually, after a brainstorming session, we came up with the idea for MusicBuddies. After the idea was approved by our professor, we started working on the wireframes as we wrapped up our research on the APIs. Finally, we started coding and the project was completed within 4 weeks.

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Difficulties:

  • There were a lot of technical challenges while we were creating the app. For example, integrating the app with all the functions we had individually implemented was difficult because there were a lot of unexpected and random errors and bugs throughout the integration process. Storing and retrieving data from the Firebase database effectively was also a challenge because there are a lot of user information we need to store including profile picture, genre, artist, birthday etc. Finally, polishing the app for the best user experience we can create in this short amount of time also required a lot of work. We used Google Material Design for the hamburger / slidable menu to make the app look professional. 

 

Overall, we worked well as a team despite the fact that we were in different time zones and we were all online, and we are all satisfied with our final work given our time frame.

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