Tech Lead Franco Valdes created a pet adoption so users can search more than 300,000 animals across the U.S. See his process and inspiration.

Building a Swipeable Pet Adoption App | Union

Apps Aren’t Just for Dating: Union Tech Lead Builds Swipeable Pet Adoption App

There’s an app for just about every way you could date these days. But what about an app that can match you with the right adoptable pet for your family? Now, thanks to Union Tech Lead Franco Valdes, there’s a swipeable – and free – app for that, too.
His new <a href="https://getpetly.com/">Petly</a> app makes it possible for users to swipe through adoptable dogs and cats, while tracking the animals they’ve swiped right (positive) and left (negative) on. They can search more than 300,000 animals at nearly 14,000 shelters across the U.S. 
“Petly keeps track of all the animals you’ve liked and those that you haven’t while maintaining their adoptability up-to-date,” he said. “In addition, it allows couples and roommates to share filters and match on liked pets. It’s a free app without ads, just tons of puppies and cats needing forever homes.”
And rather than pulling inspiration from Tinder, Franco actually got his idea from an app called <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kinder-find-baby-names/id1068421785">Kinder</a>. With Kinder, users swipe left or right on baby names. More importantly, the users can interact with their spouses through the app, so both parties can see the names they match on when they indicate their preferences.
Franco thought: Why not incorporate the same, instinctive, swipe-and-match system for couples searching for a fur baby?
“Connecting it to your partner is the biggest value prop,” he said. (Wise man.)
That’s where Petly came in. Franco and his wife traditionally foster shelter dogs during the holidays, bringing at least one animal in need to live with their own two dogs, Tripp and Homer. The couple also volunteers with the Greater Charlotte SPCA.
“It clicked,” said Franco, who has 10 years of <a href="https://cms.union.co/services/branded-content/web-mobile-app-development">app-building</a> experience and always enjoys a good coding challenge. “It would be cool if I could build something that is very much like Kinder that could hook up my search filters and my search criteria to my spouse’s search criteria to find the right dog to adopt.”
So he built out his pet adoption app in about a month at the end of 2019. 
[Related: <a href="https://union.co/articles/augmented-reality-apps">Union Dives Deeper into Augmented Reality Apps</a>]
Leveraging the free partnership option with PetFinder’s existing application programming interface, Franco added his own unique user interface. To build the app, he used <a href="https://ionicframework.com/">Ionic Framework 5</a>, a hybrid framework that lets developers leverage web app technology to then deploy onto a mobile application, compatible with both Android and iOS devices. Franco also used <a href="https://capacitor.ionicframework.com/">Capacitor</a>, a cross-platform native bridge, to allow the Petly web app to function natively on mobile devices, with helpful features like geolocation and push notifications. For data storage, Franco used Firebase, a cloud-hosted database.

While Franco makes it sound easy, he bumped up against some obstacles during his app-building process.“One of the hardest parts was getting the UI to look the way it does,” he said. “I really underestimated the difficulty behind a user-friendly swipe interface.” Now, he has two separate banks of available animals: A repository of animals and the animals on display within the app. So every time a user swipes, a new animal is ready to be added to the stack of what is available.His other major challenge was keeping the app consistent across devices. He aimed for the look and feel to stay the same across both. That’s where Ionic was helpful. As for the name of the app? Franco turned to <a href="https://www.shopify.com/tools/business-name-generator">Shopify’s</a> business name generator to come up with Petly. The generator relies on information about the business’s mission and focus to spit out hundreds of potential names. He spent a lot of time scrolling.“It gives you a lot of creative ideas that you don’t immediately think of, depending on your business criteria,” Franco said. But he recommends trying it out. “It’s definitely a creative starting point.”For general design inspiration, he dove into <a href="https://dribbble.com/">Dribbble</a>, an online showcase of creative work by designers around the world.“I live on Dribbble,” he said. “Just to see what designers are coming up with because they’re the creative people in the world.”

Challenges: Building and naming the app

Don’t aim for perfect, Franco said. Aim for functional.“A lot of people struggle with wanting it to be perfect and do everything they envision it doing instead of just getting it to a working state and putting it out there,” he said. “Then your endpoint of launching an app gets continually farther and farther away. And you keep wanting to add more features that you don’t even know if people are going to use.”Bottom line, he said: “Get it to a functional state, get it working, get it out there and then iterate.” And maybe adopt a pet while you’re at it.

Tips for aspiring app-builders

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