A new app designed to make buying and selling products more safe and efficient has arrived at the UA.
Alec Kretch created Unilist Campus Marketplace exclusively for UA students. The app requires a UA email address, which guarantees that all users are UA students. Sen. Kretch is currently working on improving the app so that students can eventually post job listings to get jobs on the UA campus.
“I think it’s a great idea to have a platform for UA students to connect and trade things to each other in a safer environment,” said Evan Hastings, the executive vice president of the Associated Students of the University of Arizona.
The idea developed during Kretch’s campaign for ASUA senate, and he thought the marketplace should be added to the Arizona mobile app. After three dedicated months of designing and programming the app, it was officially launched in the App Store on Sept. 22.
Kretch said Unilist Campus Marketplace will exclude the frustrations tagged from the Free & For Sale Facebook page by filtering the content instead of sifting through spam and receiving numerous amounts of unwanted notifications. Just like Instagram filters photos from Facebook, Unilist Campus Marketplace will filter listings from Facebook as well.
Kretch is a computer science junior at the UA and said he has learned many of his core programming values from the brightest and most dedicated professors. Additionally, he said he has been programming in iOS independently for the past three years.
Kretch said he worked on the creation of the app alone with the education learned from the computer science program UA offers. Kretch first designed the app by drawing it, converting the designs to a Photoshop document, programming the design and eventually submitting it to the App Store. According to Kretch, the app is coded in the programming language Objective-C.
The app is free and requires iOS 8.0 or later in order to be downloaded on any Apple product.
“One of my biggest goals within ASUA is to help make the UA a more interconnected and self-sufficient university,” Kretch said. “I think this app can really help that cause.”
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