Kaveri Iyer: iyerkaveri \ Karankumar Mageswaran: mageswarankk \ Ziming Wang: MikeW1121 \ Anushka Vijay: anushkavijay \ Mujia Chen: mujiaaa \ Peter Liang: hongye-liang \ Sunhu Choi: SunhuChoi
BeeFree is a screentime management app that allows you to choose apps to block, view your screentime data, and even share it with your friends! Our app allows you to create an account via Google. Once in, you are greeted with a Home Page that allows you to block any app of your choice and set up a screentime goal. Our summary page shows you the top 5 apps that you have opened and the top 5 apps that you have used based on screentime. Our sharing feature, which sets us apart from other competition, allows you to connect with friends and see their screen time usage, which is inputed by the user.
Our app likely only has one kind of user, which is the general user of the app. Everyone using our app will have the same goal, blocking their app usage.
We are not currently planning on restricting our userbase to @ucsb.edu email addresses. Notifications will be optional.
We have decided to use Swift to create an iOS mobile application. We will use Firebase and GoogleAuth for user login, and Firestore to store user information and data pertinent to the app.
Installation of this app requires Xcode 15.
Firebase authentication and our login view required firebase-ios-sdk and Google-sign-in and sign-in-swift libraries. An apple developer account is required for most deployments to ios devices outside of the built-in simulator on Xcode.
Users can install the beta version of our app according to the instructions provided by Apple here. This requires downloading our codebase onto Xcode, registering an iPhone/iPad with Xcode, creating a .ipa file which can then be installed on a user's device and then the app will be ready to use! For deployment in this course, we will create this .ipa file for the final version of our app so that users can simply install using Xcode, attach their device on Xcode, and then select our file to install on their device.
To begin, you will be directed to accept or deny permissions required for the BeeFree app to manage app information and block apps from users. Then, you will be asked to log in via Google or you can create an account if you are new to the app. Once you have logged in or created an app, you will be directed to the home page where all the main functionalities exist. A navigation bar at the bottom allows you to move to other pages, such as your profile, summary, and app blocking pages. You can block apps of specific categories or all categories(don't worry, you can't block BeeFree and essential apps like your phone app), check the summary of your top used apps and total screen time, and both share screen time to your friends and see your friends screen time.
Currently, deployment through the App Store and TestFlight are unavailable due to ScreenTimeAPI permissions. Apple is very careful with how ScreenTimeAPI is to be used and monitored in SwiftUI applications and thus, requires special permissions to both be used and published publicly for users online to use. As of now, the best way of deployment is through an Apple Developer Account and connecting with Karan. However, this is something we wish to change. We will hopefully update this in the future!