Shelter dog
IN PHOTO: A dog looks out of its at the animal welfare center in Tokushima, March 11, 2010. It's a dog's life for a stray mutt in any country, but in Japan a canine that ends up in the municipal pound is far more likely to be put down than to find a new home. While in some other industrialised countries the idea of "saving" a pet from a shelter is well-established, in Japan animal welfare activists say strays often fall foul of an attitude that prizes puppies and pedigrees as status symbols. Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon

A team of programmers have developed a new app that could help animal shelters. If there are many dating sites and apps, there is also a matchmaking platform for shelter dogs.

The app, called Pttr, works as a dating app, except it's for pets and it works by advertising those that are up for adoption from different shelters. Nature World News reports that student programmers from Florida International University, or FIU, designed the app as part of a global coding competition, the Smart City Challenge Hackathon.

The team chose to create the app to help lessen killing rates among shelters. According to the report, the team completed the project in only 48 hours. About 180 app designs were submitted to the competition and 38 designs moved forward, including Pttr, which is battling designs from places like China and New York.

Freshman Kennet Postigo, a Computer Science major from the university, explained that the app will help families who are looking to adopt find a good match. The team also hopes that the app will help shelters find permanent homes for the animals.

The app is much like an online shopping platform where families can browse pets for adoption based on the preference they have. At the same time, shelters can use the app to upload photos and provide description of the pets. It also features a "Like" button that allows families to bookmark the pet that has caught their attention. By the time they personally visit the shelter, they know which pet to look for.

Pttr is on its early stages and the developers hope that the app can become a national or global platform without giving regard to prize winnings. Currently, the app is a local project limited to cater to pet shelters in the Miami-Dade County only. It is also open-source, which means other programmers can tweak the app with the group’s approval.

"I definitely think this app will save animals' lives," said project coder Thomas Xavier "and if other developers can continue to do things like this, the app could be huge," he said as reported in Nature World News. The results of the competition will be given out by end of May.

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