What technology should I learn to make a safe app with offers/announcenemts?

Hi!

So, I want to start making mobile and web applications and one of my ideas is to create an app that allows people to post offers (something like Fiverr maybe, but way smaller scope, in a particular group of people, few - over a dozen of thousands of people optimistically) and other people could find those offers and reply to the announcer (so a simple chat or opening a mail application and putting there an address of the announcer already in the simpler version).

No payments inside the application between users - only idea of making money from this except from ads could be to charge for posting an announcement or proposing a monthly fee that allows to post X offers (so maybe it could be done via IAP? Or should I integrate PayPal somehow?).

I’m a full-time C++ developer with over 3 years of experience in ICT, hobbyist game developer (mainly Lua ), but I don’t have a particular knowledge regarding networking - so I would like to ask some of you that have more experience and already see what technology should be used in such application - please tell me - what should I learn? Can I make it with a simple HTTP server (firstly hosted on my local computer/rack, then on some cloud maybe) and client in the mobile app? Should I use any database? If so, which one could you recommend?

My first idea was to either use HTTP server+client or something like Heroic Nakama. There are also solutions I know from gamedev, but wonder if I should use them for such app as well - Microsoft Azure Playfab for example - what do you think about it? It provides pretty much everything out of the box with an API understandable for me.

If you would like to answer my question, please treat me like an idiot in the domain, who don’t know what TCP nor UDP is (because I rarely remember/understand it) - and if I need to get my ass and learn something for real - please note it, but also please provide me with steps, that would not drop me in the middle of a lake :slight_smile:

Best Regards,
Paweł

Hi and welcome to the forum @pablotitan! That’s awesome that you’re wanting to start making apps and already have an idea flowing. Sounds like you already have a few years experience working with C++ so I’m sharing a link to search results for learning networking for Android & Kotlin. There are many tutorials that touch upon this topic and I think this might be a helpful starting point.

Best,
Gina

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Hi @gdelarosa! :wave: And thank you for giving me a starting point! :wink:

Hi @pablotitan (Pawel),
Did you integrate Lua into your C++ code or use one of the frameworks?

For the posting, you need a backend that will store the data for you, the fastest way to get started is maybe using Firebase (https://www.raywenderlich.com/5114-firebase-tutorial-for-android-getting-started). For the frontend, you can look at Kotlin for Android (https://www.raywenderlich.com/4936497-your-first-kotlin-android-app) and many more articles, videos and tutorials on the RW site, including a couple of books.

Cheers,

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