Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, I took a mobile app development course over the summer. I found the course fairly useful,
and given how nowadays everyone always has a cellphone on them, I figured I should work on developing and eventually publishing my own app.
I wanted to make something useful and learn cross-platform development so my app would run on both iOS and Android.
Eventually I landed on the idea of building an app that transmits messages between phones using Bluetooth. I decided to name the app "Campfire"
as I believe that one of its best use cases is around a campfire with some friends, far away from any sort of telecommunications infrastructure.
Getting Started
5/6/2025
The first thing to do when starting any project like this is to get somewhat familiar with the tech stack. Since this was my first time working with
the Flutter framework, I started off by looking at videos and documentation online. I installed Flutter, got all the dependencies working, configured
Android Studio as the IDE, and created the Campfire project. I also setup a Github repository to facilitate more efficient development.
Early Progress
5/17/2025
After diving deeper into Flutter, I’ve been experimenting with Bluetooth packages. Namely, I started working with the Flutter Blue Plus
library to facilitate the bluetooth communication between phones. I started coding the functionality of the app as well as the GUI for it. Currently both
the graphical interface is fairly rudementary as I'm working on implementing the core communication as the primary objective.
Highlights
Phones can broadcast and find each other.
Basic UI in place, though still very rough.
Next Steps
9/20/2025
Recently I've been preoccupied with university as well as some of my other projects and as such haven't worked on my app for a while.
I do however want to continue development and will try to make more time in the future for it.
