Kikao Android App Review - House Hunting the easy way (Unreleased)

Let's talk about Kikao. Kikao is an Android app that I personally developed. It took me over 3 months to put everything together. And as the name suggests, Kikao helps you to find a rental house easily. I got the name from the Swahili language. The name means Habitat in Swahili (am not so good at Swahili, you can correct me if i'm wrong). I'll try not to start boring you with the technical stuff about which tools and languages were used to develop it...Let me just tell you what Kikao is all about.
Kikao takes the hassle out of finding your next perfect home. Whether you’re looking for a house, an apartment, a bedsitter, a townhouse, a bungalow or even just a room for rent, Kikao will lead you there. Kikao provides a new way to list and search for rental houses efficiently at no cost. With its Powerful search and filter function potential tenants and landlords can list and search from anywhere and at anytime. Once you find a rental, you can locate it on the inbuilt Google Map and find directions to the location depending on where you are located. You can also make a reservation to the rental house through calling the owner, sending an text message or even directly writing an email. You can Share the rental details and location with your contacts and help them find the perfect home. Landlords can manage their rentals from within the app.

FEATURES

NEW! Design & Interaction: We’ve rebuilt our app optimizing for simple, bold, and intuitive design

• Browse rentals on the go!: You don't need to have a user account to find a rental with Kikao. Just install the app and find your next perfect home. It is that simple. 

• Custom Filter Search: Customize your rental search by town/city, location, type of rental,purpose and more

• Instant Search: Quickly find rentals you like by GPS or location, get rid of the ones you don’t

• 1-Click Request: Contact landlords and rental property managers on the go with just one click by email, phone call or direct message - it's that easy!

• Find Directions: Find directions from your location to where the rental house is located with one tap

• Map Modes: View a map area in normal, satellite, hybrid or terrain mode

• Add Rental: Add and manage your rentals for free whether you are an agent or a landlord. Simply create an account, take a picture of the rental, fill in its details and upload the rental. Less than 2 minutes and your rental is on the map.

• Sharing: Share the houses you love with the people you love via text message, messenger, email, Facebook page and and more.

• NEW! Get featured: Send us your rental to get featured. Featured rentals appear at top of the rentals list. This will help increase your rental visibility.

WHAT'S NEW

- Optimizations and bug fixes
- Filter search by town/ city
- Add town/ city when adding a rental. Upload from anywhere 
- Fully functional navigation drawer. Get your rental featured in our next app release, About app and many more
- Switch between different map types i.e Normal, satellite, hybrid, terrain

Guess it's now the right moment to tell you what happens in the app behind the scenes. The app was 70% developed in Android Studio. I used this powerful IDE(Integrated Development Environment) from Google to create the user interfaces and create the overall logic of the application. Here, Java and XML were used. A couple of 3rd party external libraries(not the default ones that come with the Android SDK) were used.

• Volley to assist in sending and receiving HTTP calls. 
• Picasso to assist in loading and caching of images
• KGJsonConverter to convert/parse JSON Text into a List/ArrayList of a Generic Class.
• PhotoUtil for camera, loading photos in gallery, and encoding/decoding an image to a base64.
• TastyToast to 🍞 make the native android Toasts look Tasty

PHP was also used to write the scripts. Written in cPanel's text editor and Sublime Text. Database was created with MySql DBMS using phpMyAdmin and MySql Console window. Combining all this gave birth to an Android-PHP-MySql API(Application Programming Interface). The API's credibility was tested using Postman.

Here are some screenshots...

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Updated

1 March 2018

Size

Varies with device

Installs

100+

Current Version

Varies with device

Requires Android

Varies with device

Content Rating

Rated for 3+

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Permission

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Offered By

Morpho Studios

That's all for today. Why don't you download the app now and tell me how you like it in the comments below. The app is still in BETA and undergoing development. Get it from playstore...Link below