We'll Develop Your Idea Into an Android App in 24 Hours

We'll Develop Your Idea Into an Android App in 24 Hours(ideophone.in)

23 points by kingsley_20 12 years ago | 26 comments

kingsley_20 12 years ago |

Co-founder here. We got really, really good at building pretty decent apps in a hackathon timeframe. That's what we're offering - nothing more or less.

I'm going to offer a freebie for HN users - the top reply to this comment which is a project we can take on and build, we'll do for free.

bmcd 12 years ago | |

I don't know why Instagram or Twitter haven't done this yet, but I'd love an application that shows me the top 10 newsworthy photos on a world map (Google Maps). So in the US, I might see a few over NYC and LA or maybe another in the Gulf from a recent oil spill. The photos would change based on where I zoom in or out.

The app could look at Instagram's popular page or how many retweets/favorites the photo had on Twitter, etc.

It would be a visual guide to news. Future enhancements would see a scrolling timeline, so you could choose a date and location and see what was going on. And in a few years, the collection of photos would serve as an amazing location-based history of our world.

kingsley_20 12 years ago | | |

This sounds like a really cool idea. We gave the freebie to someone else, but if you want to pay to have this developed, we can certainly do that for you.

KentuckyJim 12 years ago | |

I want a widget that I can use on my android phone to link things to my wife. I imagine something like this already exists,I just don't know what it would be called.

I would like to:

1. Use a Google drive account as our shared storage space.

2. Be able to drag and drop files, images, links, maybe drawings to a widget that we each have on our phone. Maybe just having a separate option appear that says "send to widget thing" would be more reasonable.

3. I would like a notification to appear along with led notification. I would prefer to choose how the notification appears.

xur17 12 years ago | | |

What about something like pushbullet? It doesn't have a widget like you described, but it allows you to easily send files, links, etc to each other (you can send to 'friends' now too).

xur17 12 years ago | |

I'd love an app frontend for http://pizzacodes.com. This would basically consist of two unique pages / views:

1. A location search 'view'.

2. A Location view that would show a list of coupons for that given store.

Both of these views would use an api that I create to return the nearby stores / content.

kingsley_20 12 years ago | | |

Thanks for giving us a shot xur17. In 15 hrs, if yours is still the top post, we'll get it done :)

kingsley_20 12 years ago | | |

Ok, you're on. Let's connect over email? Mine's kingsley@ideophone.in .

RyanZAG 12 years ago |

$250 for a full day of both devs and designers, plus some kind of product manager to work through the idea? Can't say it's not cheap. I have my doubts you'll end up with anything impressive though. Would be nice for someone to give it a try and post the results.

EDIT: To clarify, I have doubts because it is cheap. Generally a team which can build good mobile apps would have no need to try and get work for $250 a day when there are companies who would pay them 5x or 10x that - so the low price creates a feeling that the work must be low quality even if its not. You guys might be underpricing severely here...

kingsley_20 12 years ago | |

We're based in Bangalore. I'm a product manager with 6 yrs' experience in the valley building salesforce.com's first social products & Digital Chocolate's first social games. My co-founders have worked at Yahoo, InMobi & TAT. We're offering short timeframes and low prices because we can afford to (being in India), and have no patience for negotiating rates.

yashg 12 years ago | |

The prices are about right. They may seem super cheap to others but are on a bit higher side for India. A decent developer's salary costs are between $40-$60 a day in India and that is a very good salary that the developer is making. Same for the designer.

collyw 12 years ago |

So it looks like they are really cherry-picking the most interesting / easy work. The 20% (time) of the 80 / 20 rule.

"We will only take on short, well-scoped projects at the idea & sketch stage. The project size restrictions will also help you focus and scope out a truly minimal product."

kingsley_20 12 years ago | |

I guess we're looking for well-scoped projects that are within what we are able to execute. We're a team of 4, and we can get quite a lot done, including UX and backend instead of just an app. What you get is 4 specialists who will focus on your project for a short amount of time, and what they think they're capable of executing.

ppradhan 12 years ago |

A friend of mine approached this team with an app idea he had. They discussed the scope and these guys did give an estimate of 3 days.

Then, bizarrely enough, they said they wouldn't be able to work on the product because they 'don't have a working android tablet'. Very strange response/excuse indeed.

This is certainly a clever way for them to advertise what they have on offer on HN - but there seems to be a difference in the way they are advertising their services and the way they are responding to proposals.

Would like to hear from people that ended up working with them.

Edit: my friend was also asked by these guys if he as any 'friends in bangalore than can lend them an android tablet'... I'm not sure what to make of that!

mmsimanga 12 years ago |

Sigh, my boss is going to wonder why I need a few weeks to develop stuff.

kingsley_20 12 years ago | |

I'll be honest about the things we probably can't do. Games, for one. Enterprise apps that need access to private APIs are another. I could probably go on, but you get the drift. We're on the same page as landing page creators and other lean startup tools.

mrich 12 years ago | |

You can outsource your work before he does.

ljf 12 years ago | |

The final 20% always takes the longest...

norswap 12 years ago |

Interesting. Wondering about the scope they're talking about. How many views? Local persistence? Communication with a remote API?

kingsley_20 12 years ago | |

We don't want to narrow down scope to very discrete things. We're a tight-knit team, and we've built many things in a 24hr timeframe. We regularly win practically every hackathon in Bangalore. So odds are, we'll often find a way to do things.

That said, we're probably not the best suited for projects were prior context is important, such as integrating with an existing private API.

m4tthumphrey 12 years ago |

I assume the code is passed over once completed, so this is a good service if just to get an app off the ground...

kingsley_20 12 years ago | |

Yes, we deliver code & assets once the product is completed. You have exactly the right idea - we help get the product off the ground, and create quick MVPs.

kyriakos 12 years ago |

are there any samples of client work you've done? really interested to see. thanks.

if you can share the app names in public that is..

kingsley_20 12 years ago | |

We can share the ones that we have developed ourselves: (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Ideophone&hl...) 1. One Touch SOS & variants (we have some country specific variants with local police/security integrations). 2. Suruk: a user-configurable tuktuk/taxi meter, to double check that you're not being cheated. Some versions with adequate usage also give crowdsourced estimates of average distance between points. 3. Kopa is a whitelabel Ride sharing app targeted at events 4. DroidJuice plots and graphs your battery usage online (without draining your battery itself), and lets you send automatic "low battery" messages to a predefined receiver list or FB.