CoQuest — Spontaneous Social Coordination

Overview

College students have moments of free time but hesitate to reach out beyond their closest friends, so spontaneous hangouts rarely happen. CoQuest lets users broadcast lightweight, time-boxed "quests" (e.g. "Jamba run in 5") to a live campus map and to custom friend groups, so saying yes is a single tap and staying silent carries no social cost. Built end-to-end in React Native with a Firebase/Firestore backend, it was piloted with a real cohort of Stanford students, who used it to coordinate actual in-person meetups.

Highlights

• Built a full-stack mobile app (React Native + Firebase) with Firestore-backed real-time listeners for live quest feeds and RSVP counts, and Firebase Auth gated to campus email addresses.
• Integrated the LocationIQ API to reverse-geocode quest locations onto a live map, with subscriptions scoped per-user to minimize data usage and keep updates lag-free.
• Piloted with a real user cohort: 10 users generated 67 quests over a 3-day deployment, and iterative UX fixes cut average quest-creation time from 18 seconds to under 7.
• Designed the data model (users, quests, groups) and read/write flows in Firestore, handling race conditions and async writes for consistent RSVP state.

Tech & topics

• React Native
• Firebase
• Firestore
• Full-Stack
• Real-Time Systems
• Mobile
• Geolocation