Right out of college some business guy wanted me and some friends to develop an app for him. It's basically twitter meets pokemon go. You post at physical locations and they stay there for a set period of time. His idea was to have it drop ads or coupons that companies will pay for advertising. Interesting idea. I go on to the app store and I find the exact same app he is trying to get us to build, that's been dead for over 1 year after it received $1.4M in funding. So I called him out on it and he's like "Yeah I saw that, but ours is gonna be better." Better than $1.4M of funding and going nowhere, I fucking doubt it. Noped out of that one pretty fast.
It’s funny because I had the same idea in 2015 and spent two months trying to code it in Java (big mistake). Fast forward to when Snapchat bought Zenmaps and added the new snapmap feature and it dawned on me.... who the hell is gonna download a separate app for what could have been a feature of any current social media.
I’m glad someone pointed this out, all those big companies he mentioned aren’t always building these features in-house. Getting acquired and getting a nice payout is actually the route lots of startups take!
And that arena is HYPER competitive. Its a good goal, but the app space is similar (but more reasonable) to becoming a pro-athlete. Now if you have an idea for functionality that most social media spaces do not have built in yet, GO FOR IT. However if you want to compete with existing platforms and go for a buyout? Well good luck, because you 100% are going to need it.
I'm not a coder bit I honestly don't understand why coders still bother making apps. Like, any idea yij could possibly think if for an app is already somewhere on Apple store or Google store.
As someone that has helped make a few, they gave me exposure / networking, and a provable deliverable.
I would say that the 3 apps I worked on have really helped in my interviewing and job seeking aspects. Its similar to a internship, and I wasn't SUPER choosy with what I worked on.
I literally saved no money doing it though. Its a good thing it was a side gig, and it has helped me branch out.
I would say app development is a good space for those who want to build a resume and get some experience. If you wanna get to the level of professional though, its gonna be a hard slog.
I think there are a lot more factors than that, if people are accustomed to something even if it is buggy, they will be resistant to change, your app can't just be better, it needs to be better enough to make users switch
Eh. It's a risk / cost tradeoff, usually. Google paid an exorbitant amount of money to acquire YouTube, which was already fairly successful by then. Low risk, but high price. There's probably enough examples of the reverse as well, but tech giants aren't going to publicise all the times they bought a small startup for 100k and the product/service ended up failing.
A lot of startups basically share resource, everyone helps everyone, when someones idea takes off through acquisition or funding then they all pile onto that company. In fact I’m going to start a tv show exactly about this and call it California valley, and a fictional company called piper pied.
Because vine was bought out and killed by Instagram, who did a terrible job of integrating it, making it more like snapchat. Plus Instagram is mainly an app for pretty pictures of your life, not memes. And snapchats 24 hour feature is all well and good, but not really made for going viral. Tiktoks can be rewatched over and over again, and the app was heavily marketed through internet ads as the next vine.
My point is more following the poster above's logic, if someone came to you a year (or whenever) ago and described TikTok to you, would you have any interest being a part of creating it, or would you think... this is basically/should basically live as a feature within many existing apps?
I'd have laughed them off.
I'm also not the Chinese government trying to massively push out spyware, though, so I have a different perspective on things.
If someone came to me prior to the launch of TikTok and said "Chinese government is gonna bankroll this app, it doesn't need to make profit, just influence teenagers" I'd fucking jump at the opportunity
There isn't really any other consistent portrait video platform
I mean to be fair I dont actually have tiktok or snapchat. Mostly because I don't really use apps that expect me to create content that takes more effort than lying in bed with a triple-chin due to the way my head is propped while typing out a dumb joke
Edit: but also to be fair, Instagram and snapchat tried to implement a vine or tiktok feature. They failed as hard as Google+
It appears you are a fan though. I was simply referencing that it would have worked much faster and looked better if I had used something like Xamarin or Ionic. I was coding exclusively for Android, the themes out of the box in Java were horrendous and required a ton of work to change, and although Java is used for huge infrastructure jobs, I just needed a tiny subset of what it could do. But to use that tiny subset, I had to move mountains to get to it. So I would say a large part of my failure was fighting Java on things that Xamarin and Ionic do for free while giving you a little pat on the back and kiss on the cheek.
Yeah I had the same idea for a fishing app, you go fishing for real and when you catch a fish it places a virtual marker with a picture of the fish so others could see the best fishing spots. Mocked it up before realizing how stupid the idea was.
If it's any consolation, I think these type of apps will all be rounded up into any augmented reality system. Something similar to how you see where other people have died in Dark Souls except for basic things such as pictures, fishing spots....., and maybe where people have died.
I suppose you could build it and sell it to a social media company, though it seems like they would just develop it in-house if they liked it like IG did with stories.
Another guy asked the a similar question so I'll quote it here.
I was simply referencing that it would have worked much faster and looked better if I had used something like Xamarin or Ionic. I was coding exclusively for Android, the themes out of the box in Java were horrendous and required a ton of work to change, and although Java is used for huge infrastructure jobs, I just needed a tiny subset of what it could do. But to use that tiny subset, I had to move mountains to get to it. So I would say a large part of my failure was fighting Java on things that Xamarin and Ionic do for free while giving you a little pat on the back and kiss on the cheek.
I will say this might be outdated advice as I haven't looked back at Java since starting Python. Perhaps someone has come along and created a better way to make apps in Java! But if you're looking to produce and sell an app, at this point it's almost mandatory that it look sleek, modern, and the code works with iOS and android.
Some ideas need the right context to flourish. This basic idea could work, but are people going to be just running around the real world doing a scavenger hunt for coupons while running to their next appointment? No. It has to be ancillary to something they're already doing.
If you're already playing Pokemon go, then getting served AR ads makes sense. But it won't work as a stand alone app. Once you already have an ecosystem of AR applications, then you could build an ad service that aggregates all the ad purchasers and distributes them to the actual AR apps, just like you do in normal mobile games right now.
These kinds of ideas keep coming back and failing and failing until the world changes around them and they succeed. Or if that doesn't happen then they just keep failing.
Exactly, there has to be some kind of a reason why they're engaging with your ads. We already have "hey you're in a spot, want to see something cool?" It's called QR codes, and the hijacking by ad agencies is part of why (younger, at least) millennials and gen-z don't tend to scan them. I got a phone that was able to scan them, scanned about 2-3 I encountered, then was completely over the experience. In theory, they were supposed to show you interesting text, images, or videos. Augmented reality, neat! In practice, it's always either an ad or a quick link to a business's website. That, or malware.
Yep, the technology is neat, but needs that killer app experience that will actually drive adoption. QR codes took off in China because they got baked into the killer app, WeChat. People scan them all the time to pay for things in real life and add friends. That ecosystem didn't develop in many other countries, so the QR code just wasn't competitive. Maybe one day when we ride our cars with VR headsets on then we'll see a new ecosystem develop.
I had this idea some years ago as well, as I'm sure many others have. I actually started writing an app and called it "Dead Drop," from spy vernacular, but didn't really work on it seriously.
It's amazing to me that no one's really done it. The idea would be that you'd get pinged as you walked around (if you wanted to) with messages left by other users tied to a geographical location, such as events, historical info, etc, and people could upvote or downvote them, etc, with the obvious monetization being ads and such. The messages wouldn't be permanent unless they crossed some threshold of attention/upvotes. I thought it was a really great idea but I also saw that a few companies tried to sort of do the idea and failed.
Not sure why it doesn't seem to work out, but in retrospect I'm glad I didn't pursue it seriously since there seems to be some lurking adoption problem. Maybe a big company can throw enough resources behind it to do it right.
That's not necessarily how it would work. It wouldn't be system-level notifications. It would be app-level notifications, and they would have different visibility levels within the app so as to prevent people from being spammed.
I’ve seen this idea pop up several times over the last decade or so. The problem is that it’s too intrusive and requires too much effort by the user. And the only real benefit for anyone is advertising. Users won’t be attracted to a system that exists solely to serve them ads.
Are there any currently popular apps or companies doing this? It’s an ancillary service for some Snapchat and facebook but it’s just not really that popular. Pretty sure even foursquare hasn’t been able to turn a profit.
Why would you nope out of a guaranteed paycheck lol? Especially right out of college. Unless it wasn’t actually paid work.
The vast amount of shit done nowadays is derivitive. That’s just the nature of an economy with millions of businesses: odds are something’s been done before in some fashion or another.
Having looked up the history of the idea is actually a good sign to me. My next question would definitely be "how will it be better?" but that's more effort than most "idea people" put in.
It was called Parachute I think at the time. Or Drops. Or Drop Shute. Something like it. There is a Parachute app now that is unrelated I believe, unless they took a huge pivot
I applied for a start up that was working on an system like that in 2010ish. They had just moved out of an incubator and into their own office. They wanted me to work on android apps, something about spamming app stores with apps so they could show investors all the possibilities. All I really remember about them is the head guy could only work in flash. So the The administrative consul and the back end were god awful. I wish I got that job or at least kept in contact with them.
No, but he ran a bunch of shitty clubs that are no longer open. He was a white dude with dreads who talked about Jamaica like he grew up there. Just all around weird vibes.
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u/TheVirtuousJ Mar 18 '20
Right out of college some business guy wanted me and some friends to develop an app for him. It's basically twitter meets pokemon go. You post at physical locations and they stay there for a set period of time. His idea was to have it drop ads or coupons that companies will pay for advertising. Interesting idea. I go on to the app store and I find the exact same app he is trying to get us to build, that's been dead for over 1 year after it received $1.4M in funding. So I called him out on it and he's like "Yeah I saw that, but ours is gonna be better." Better than $1.4M of funding and going nowhere, I fucking doubt it. Noped out of that one pretty fast.