Gather Valuable Customer Feedback with a Custom App
Are you looking for a way to gather valuable feedback from your customers? Building a customer feedback app could be the perfect solution. In this article, we’ll walk you through building an app using React Native and Firebase. Creating a customer review app benefits both consumers and businesses by empowering consumers, building trust, influencing purchase decisions, providing valuable feedback, fostering a sense of community, and helping businesses make better apps through user insights.
The Power of React Native and Firebase
With React Native, you can easily create a cross-platform app that works on both iOS and Android devices. On the other hand, Firebase makes it easy to store and manage user feedback in real-time. So, let’s dive into the details of building a customer feedback app for food using React Native and Firebase.
Initializing the Frontend with Expo
To create a new project using Expo, open up your terminal, move to your projects directory, and enter the following command. We’ll use Expo to create our project, build our app, and run it on a simulator or a physical device.
Setting Up the Backend in Firebase
We’re going to use Firebase to build the backend. For React Native, we will use @react-native-firebase/app and its sub-tools: /firestore as a database and /storage for storing images. After the basic setup is complete, you will see a Firebase dashboard and the option to add the app.
Initializing the Firestore Database
Now, we need to initialize the Firestore database and storage to use them in the app. Head to the Firebase dashboard and click Build, and then Firestore. Select Start in Test mode and choose the location of the database. We have a document-based database initialized for our app.
Adding Content to Your React Native App
To add content to your React Native app, click Cloud Storage and upload the images of the food items you want to show on the app. Then, go to Firestore to start a food-items collection to store data on food items.
Building the Routes
Let’s create an app directory to store our path files. Expo-router uses an app directory to serve routes for the app. Create the directory and add a file named index.tsx. We will also create a _layout.tsx file to configure the router as Stack.
Creating the Screens
Because we’ve already added the routes, we will create a new directory in the root of our app where the UI of the app will live. Create the directory screens. Then, add a file named Home.tsx; this component will list all the food items stored on our Firestore database. From there, add another file named Review.tsx. This component will allow the users to add their feedback for the food item, upload images, and store reviews in the database.
Making the Feedback Screen
This is the most important screen in the entire app because it allows a user to publish their review of the selected food item. On this screen, we have the name, image, and description of the food item. Now, for the feedback part, we have a text input to receive a textual review of the item. Then, we have the rating stars that a user can provide according to their satisfaction. From there, we have the add image section where a user can post up to three images.
Uploading Images
Moving on to uploading the images, we’ll use an asynchronous function called pickImage. This function is responsible for launching the device’s image library and allowing the user to select an image. It uses the expo-image-picker library to accomplish this. The function awaits the completion of the image selection process and stores the result. If the selection was not canceled, it calls the uploadImage function with the URI of the selected image.
By following these steps, you can create a customer feedback app that empowers consumers, builds trust, and provides valuable feedback to businesses. With React Native and Firebase, you can create a seamless and scalable app that meets the needs of your customers.