Unleash the Power of Stories in Your React Native App
The Rise of Ephemeral Content
In today’s digital landscape, stories have become an integral part of our online experience. From WhatsApp to Snapchat and Instagram, this feature has taken the world by storm. But what makes stories so appealing? For one, they offer a unique way to share media in the form of images, videos, and text with our friends and contacts. Additionally, they provide a sense of exclusivity, as they are usually only viewable for 24 hours.
Building a Stories Feature from Scratch
So, you want to develop your own stories feature using React Native and Firestore? Let’s dive in! We’ll start by reviewing the database structure, which consists of users, user IDs, stories, and story IDs.
Our Mission: Achieve Three Key Targets
To create a fully functional stories feature, we need to accomplish three main objectives:
- Add Your Story/Status: Allow users to upload images and videos to Firebase Storage and update records in Firestore collections.
- List All User Statuses: Retrieve records from Firestore user collections and filter them to show only stories from the last 24 hours.
- View All User Statuses/Stories: Render selected user stories and allow users to view them.
Target 1: Add Your Story/Status
Using Expo’s Image Picker, we’ll select images, convert them into blobs, and upload them to Firebase Storage. We’ll then update records in Firestore collections. Congratulations, we’ve just uploaded our first image/story!
Target 2: List All User Statuses
Next, we’ll create a Firebase query to retrieve all user collections with Snapshot, ensuring real-time data. We’ll then filter the results to show only stories from the last 24 hours and render them using a custom styling component.
Target 3: View All User Statuses/Stories
In the final phase, we’ll render selected user stories and allow users to view them. We’ll use react-native-banner-carousel for swiping images and update the Firestore sub-collection with user IDs when someone views a story.
The Final Touches
To complete our stories feature, we’ll add auto-swipe functionality and a progress bar at the top of each story. Check out the demo and explore the GitHub repo for more details and working code.
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