The problem
Bringing chat, calls, live video, and location-based discovery into one social app, in three languages, means stitching together a lot of separate systems until they feel like a single coherent product.
What I built
I built Gulf Arab Chat end to end: account creation and recovery with email, phone, and social sign-in; one-to-one chat and messaging; voice and video call flows; live streaming; nearby and discovery; profiles and photos; privacy controls including an invisible mode; report and block tools; notifications; and wallet and gift screens, all localized into English, Arabic, and French. To ship features like in-app calling, live video, and gifting on a reasonable timeline, the app integrates a number of third-party UI and media modules rather than building every piece from scratch; the repository bundles many of them.
Tech stack
The Android client is written in Java on top of Firebase and Google Maps / Location for nearby discovery. It also talks to a Parse-style backend for some of its server-side data handling.
What I learned
Social products need privacy, moderation, and permission design worked out before anything else.
Building the invisible mode, the report-and-block flow, and the notification settings taught me that the “boring” trust-and-safety plumbing of a social app takes as much design thought as chat or live video does.