App Store Link: Charity Jar

While studies show that phone usage amplifies anxiety and depression, philanthropy has proven to suppress them. Charity Jar provides a solution for users to reduce anxiety and depression, limit phone usage, or simply justify it. Charity Jar makes donating as easy as unlocking a phone. Each phone unlock represents a donation to a charity. The user defines the total donation for each unlock.

I refactored and updated the UI/UX of Charity Jar, and solved some of the challenges this application was facing. We also transferred the server from a local machine to AWS, utilizing a scalable EC2/RWS instance. Tracking unlocks on the background of iOS devices is no easy task, because Apple makes restricts access to applications running in the background. The only way an app is allowed to continuously run in the background is if it needs location services allowed persistently. I began by creating a map which displayed the number of unlocks that took place at each location. This did not get by Apple’s review team. Next I made a geofencing application that would notify if the user if they were in the proximity of a charity that they might be interested in. After reviewing this version the application got on the store. I also created screenshots and modified the backend written in PHP.