Full-stack civic mobile app

FamilyPromise Mobile Matching App

A role-based mobile app helping tenants, property owners, and case handlers coordinate Section 8 housing voucher matches in one workflow.

Overview

Housing-match coordination involves different users with different responsibilities. The app needed to make tenant needs, property-owner listings, and case-handler review feel like one coherent workflow instead of separate spreadsheets, calls, and manual follow-up.

The system centres on account roles, session-cookie authentication, profile management, property creation, available listings, and a match endpoint designed to grow into a fuller eligibility and case-review workflow.

This was university coursework, built by a team. It is included as evidence of role-based access design and mobile-plus-API integration, which transfer directly to customer portal work. It was not a commercial engagement, and Family Promise is not a client. The repository belongs to a teammate and is linked above.

The transferable lesson is about sequencing: role design has to be settled early, because it determines navigation, profile data, protected endpoints, and testing paths all at once.

Status: University team project, Fall 2024 — built with multiple contributors
Built for: Tenants seeking housing, property owners listing units, and case handlers reviewing matches
Role: Full-stack developer, mobile UI implementation, Flask API integration, backend testing
Timeline: Fall 2024
Platforms: iOS, Android
Categories: Mobile Apps, Customer Portals

The FamilyPromise matching app shown across mobile screens

What was built

Responsibilities and core features

Responsibilities

React Native and Expo screens for login, account creation, property creation, and matching
Integration against Flask REST endpoints
Session-cookie authentication in protected role-specific requests
Backend testing and Postman documentation of payloads and response shapes

Core features

Login, account creation, role selection, and profile setup
Three distinct user roles with different navigation and permissions
Property intake so owners can create listing records
Available listings surfaced to tenant match workflows
Match-interest flow for tenants, with case-handler review
Session-cookie authentication across protected endpoints

Screens

Engineering

Problems that came up, and what fixed them

The specifics matter more than the feature list. This is what the work actually consisted of.

Role design settled first, because everything depends on it
Three roles with genuinely different responsibilities shape navigation, profile data, protected endpoints, and every testing path. Deciding the role model early was what allowed the rest of the app to be built without repeated rework.
Documented API contracts for a multi-contributor team
Mobile forms become far easier to build when payloads and response shapes are documented with real examples. Postman collections documented the JSON contracts and authenticated flows, which mattered because frontend and backend were being written in parallel by different people.

Technical architecture

React Native and Expo frontend for iOS and Android screens including login, account creation, property creation, and matching views
Flask backend with RESTful endpoints for registration, login and logout, user profiles, profile updates, property creation, property browsing, and match intent
Session-cookie authentication used in backend testing and protected role-specific API requests
Postman testing documentation validating JSON payloads, response shapes, and authenticated user flows
Team repository workflow with multiple contributors and a README documenting local frontend and backend setup

Technology stack

React Native
Expo
TypeScript
Flask
Python
REST APIs
Postman

What it adds up to

Three user roles supported across one shared codebase
Registration, login and logout, profiles, profile updates, property creation, property browsing, and match intent covered by the API
Authenticated flows validated through documented Postman collections

Related services

The work this project demonstrates

Custom Software

One system that matches your real process, instead of four tools and a spreadsheet holding the gaps together.

Customer Portals

A portal takes the ten repeated questions off your phone and puts them behind a login, answered accurately, at two in the morning.

Mobile Apps

Cross-platform apps in React Native and Expo — including the background, permission, and store-review work that decides whether an app actually ships.

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