With a large number of UT events and parties every week, the clutter can be overwhelming. Students have designed GroupMes, posters and social media accounts to share these gatherings, but mathematics junior Johnson Dinh created Cove to group them together and make it easier to find events.

Dinh designed Cove for college students, and the developers specifically targeted those who attend the University. The app organizes and assembles events occurring near college campuses into one application for attendees to explore. He said a GroupMe for parties on campus inspired his app.

“It was really cluttered with spam (and) people talking about random stuff. It was really unorganized, and people would just keep missing stuff,” Dinh said. “There’s so many events going on, but it’s so disorganized. It’s not in one place.”

During orientation this summer, Dinh said he met other students who shared his enthusiasm for Cove and together they spent most of the summer creating the app. One of those students was Cristian Aguilar, a general assistant who helps market the app. 

“I had my orientation, and he let me stay at his place for a week,” mathematics freshman Aguilar said. “I loved the idea so much that I moved instead of waiting for August, I moved out midsummer and stayed with him. … It’s like I’ve been there from the beginning, supporting him.”

Aguilar said following the Apple App Store release, he was amazed with the instant success of Cove. 

“Just the amount of users we were able to get within 24 hours is crazy,” Aguilar said. “It was 200. But then seeing the growth from there on, we’re almost reaching 3000 users just on iOS.” 

Avery Crouse, a rhetoric and writing freshman, said she goes back and forth between Cove and other platforms to find events to attend. However, she said that as Cove grows, she is beginning to transition to only using the app. 

“I prefer Cove because it’s more concentrated, and I know exactly where to go for all the events,” Crouse said. “(With) social media each organization has a different page. You have to look all over, and it takes just a lot more time to find events. With Cove, you can find events from organizations that you would have never heard about before.”

While Dinh said he is excited with where Cove has gone so far, his team mostly markets through word of mouth, and plans to expand the app even more.

“We’re just waiting for Android to be released because right now, it’s purely Apple iOS, and we only launched a month ago,” Dinh said. “We’re still pretty brand new.” 

Dinh said the Android version of Cove: College Events will release Nov. 2.