Dorm.ly

Dorm.ly
Why choose Dorm.ly

Inspiration

Living in a university hostel often involves navigating fragmented systems. checking facility availability manually, coordinating with peers through multiple platforms, and lacking visibility into shared resources like dining spaces or laundry. These inefficiencies inspired us to design a centralized solution that simplifies daily hostel living. We wanted to create an experience similar to a “super app” like Grab, but tailored specifically for campus residential life, bringing convenience, transparency, and community into one platform.

What it does

Dorm.ly is an all-in-one hostel companion that integrates essential services for students living on campus. It provides a peer-to-peer marketplace for buying, selling, and renting items, real-time facility crowd tracking for dining, recreation, and utilities, and a personalized room dashboard that includes utilities monitoring such as air-conditioning usage and laundry timers. By consolidating these features, the app reduces friction in everyday decision-making and enhances the overall hostel experience.

How we built it

We developed Dorm.ly using Flutter to create a responsive, mobile-first interface that can also run as a web application for rapid prototyping. The system is structured into modular pages: Home, Marketplace, Facilities, and My Room, managed through a centralized navigation shell. Each feature was built as reusable UI components (cards, lists, indicators), ensuring scalability and maintainability.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was managing UI state and navigation across multiple pages while maintaining a clean architecture. Ensuring consistent layout behavior (such as avoiding overflow issues and handling dynamic content like timers) required careful structuring of widgets. Another challenge was translating design concepts from Figma into functional Flutter components while preserving visual fidelity. Additionally, balancing feature scope with implementation time meant prioritizing core functionalities over full backend integration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully created a cohesive, fully interactive prototype that demonstrates how multiple hostel-related services can be unified into a single platform. The real-time elements, such as the laundry countdown timer and crowd indicators, effectively showcase the app’s potential for practical use. We are particularly proud of the clean UI/UX design and modular architecture, which makes the app both intuitive for users and extensible for future development.

What we learned

Through this project, we gained hands-on experience in building a structured Flutter application, particularly in managing widget hierarchies, state, and navigation. We also learned the importance of designing with the user in mind ,prioritizing clarity, accessibility, and efficiency. Translating a conceptual design into a working prototype highlighted the gap between design intent and technical implementation, reinforcing the need for iterative testing and refinement.

What's next for Dorm.ly

The next step is to integrate real backend services, enabling live data for facility crowd levels, booking systems, and marketplace transactions. We also plan to incorporate user authentication, push notifications, and predictive features such as recommending optimal times to use facilities. In the long term, Dorm.ly could evolve into a scalable platform adopted across multiple universities, adapting to different campus infrastructures while maintaining a consistent user experience.