Development and evaluation of mobile application for room rental information with chat and push notification

Traditionally, when someone needs to find a boarding house or other room rental, he/she will contact the boarding house's manager via telephone and go to the place directly. This activity takes time and effort. To make it easier, android application is developed to optimize the process. Chat feature and push notification are important features of the application to enable users to get additional and up-to-date information from management. However, until this day, there is no mobile application for room/house rental which incorporates built-in chatting and the push notification features. The purpose of this study is to develop a mobile application incorporating chat and push notification feature to provide information about boarding houses and evaluate it. Features developed in this application are login, view boarding rooms list, view detail, review, view map, chat, and broadcast information. An evaluation shows that the application is useful to provide boarding house information and to communicate between room seekers and building managers.