Hop! was born from a simple observation: when friends want to know what’s happening right here, they don’t need a sprawling social feed—they just need a snapshot of the spots within arm’s reach. I set out to build exactly that: a location-aware bulletin board that bubbles up the nearest venues and lets people trade quick, text-only updates in real time.

On launch, Hop! quietly pings the Yelp Fusion API, pulling a fresh list of cafés, bars, and hangouts within a 300-meter radius and sorting them by distance. The UI is a clean, scrollable list—no map to pinch or zoom—so users can hop into the closest venue in a single tap. Each venue hosts its own lightweight feed where anyone on-site can post text updates, up-vote or down-vote messages, and thread comments beneath them. Everything syncs through Firebase Authentication(phone-number sign-in) and Cloud Firestore, so the feed feels live even on spotty networks.

Under the hood, the app tracks the user’s location just enough to refresh the venue list without draining the battery, then binds SwiftUI views to Firestore listeners for snappy, 60 fps updates. Building Hop! sharpened my skills in three areas:

- Phone-based auth that on-boards new users in under 30 seconds.

- Real-time synchronization of text threads with Firestore’s snapshot listeners.

- Continuous location awareness

Hop! is live on the iOS App Store (14.0 +), and I’m gathering real-world feedback to shape the roadmap. Upcoming experiments include photo posts, quick polls, ephemeral chats, automatic post expiry, and a serverless moderation layer—all aimed at keeping the conversation fresh and hyper-local. If you have ideas or want to see the next evolution of proximity-based social, download Hop! and let me know what you’d love to build together.