Hey! This is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, let's try to answer the question "What type of app should I make?"
Okay, so, it's another beautiful sunny, winter afternoon here in Oxfordshire.
The Sun is low in the sky, which is perfect for filming. It's just
right over there. And it was just - it was a great day
to get out into the office and look, it's not even that cold. I'll be able to take off
the big coat. It's only one week to Christmas and I'm like nowhere
near ready. But, you know, I guess I'll figure it out. I always do. So today,
I want to answer a question that came in on the last video from Sanam Shrestha. He
said, "I want to create an app, but don't know which type of app I should make. Can
anyone suggest me, share your ideas?" That's a good question. I mean, it's an
easy question with not an easy answer. What kind of app should you make? I
think, you should make a emoticon app. Yeah, why not, right? We don't need it. We
need more of those. So, I think, there's lots of different ways you can answer
that question. Should you do a utility or a game? Should you do, you know, what other
type of stuff to do. But, I think, the important thing, Sanam, is that you - you
know that you want to do an app. That's the first step. And so for
me, like to give you an idea, with me and my biggest app Ear Spy - how it started,
right? I knew I wanted to do an app and I wanted to get into it, but like
you, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. It wasn't like I had this
bolt of inspiration and I had the idea first, and then I learned the technology.
No. It was like I was learning the technology and then the idea
comes. So, I think of it like musicians. Like you know, I'm sure
John Lennon didn't start writing music before he knew how to play music. No.
Musicians learn how to play music and then they're able to write the
music. Then it comes to them. It's not like, you know, they come, I got
this - I got this tune if I just learn how to play play a guitar or something.
So yeah, I think in terms of
technology, a lot of times the app ideas that you get come from your experience.
Learning how to do the code and learning how to do things. That's why I think it's
important to learn code when you're going forward. So,
my biggest app is called Ear Spy. I talk about it all the time. Or it's
called Ear Agent on Android. So, basically,
what happened was I wanted to do an app and I had this idea for an
app. But I kind of started coding it, learning the technology and it was this
body alarm thing. So like, some way that you could - like if you walk in through
the streets late at night and you know somebody's following you, you just
press a button and it will send text messages out to everybody and it was
trigger this alarm and all this things would happen. And
then I realized how often Android crashes. I thought, it's not really
something I want to do, like I don't wanna want to be sued for
something like that. But I learned a lot in the coding up to that. I kind
of I knew that I wanted to do an app and I and I was like, sort of, I guess I was
receptive to ideas. I'm kind of looking around at things and thinking I
really want to get into this. So, I'm trying to learn it, but I didn't really
have a big idea. And then one day, I was- so I was working - I was contracting at a
company where we do like web applications and stuff like that. I was
working on this web application that was just - it was not very popular. It
was this - it was this app that everybody had to use and so like management
made people use this website and this web application. And a lot
of people really, really hated it. They hated the fact that they had to use
it, because they said it's slow, the interface is slow. I didn't -
by the way, I didn't do the initial coding. I was just doing maintenance on
it, you know, it's sort of like that was my thing. And it was built
on this framework that was just inherently slow. See, I'm gonna tell you
that because it's true. So anyway, so it wasn't very
popular and sometimes you'd hear people talking about it. I was sitting there in
the corner of the office, you know, as a contractor sitting there on my Windows
laptop at the time with my headphones in. But I wasn't
listening to music, but I look like I was listening to music. And I can hear
people mentioning the name of this application and it was just sort of
murmurs and everything. I try not to say it so that I would hear them
because, you know, because they liked me, they just didn't like the application.
I remember thinking if only there was a way I could use the
microphone on this laptop and then I could just like turn it up so I can just
hear what's going into the microphone and then I could hear it through the
headphones. And I could turn the volume up all the way and then maybe I'll be able
hear what they're saying. And it didn't hit me right then. But then
later on, I started thinking, "Hey, wait a second. We could do that on the phone. We
can do that as an application ." And then I started thinking of doing this and you
know, my Ear Spy idea. We'll put an equalizer on there to try to filter out
certain noises. I mean, that's how it all startedt because I knew I wanted to
do an app and I was looking around for ideas. I mentioned this idea to
a few different people and quite a few people including my family told me, "Yeah,
don't do that. That's creepy. But I did it anyway. And then you know, hundreds
of thousands of pounds later, it's still the biggest earner and yeah, I was still
trying to to recapture that same level of revenue from other applications, but
not successful yet. But, you know, you gotta keep grinding them out.
Keep trying to reproduce it, but I think the important thing is that you
you know that you want to do an app. Start looking around, you know, you can
get inspiration from the code. If you're learning how to code something, give
yourself like a a sample project, so you can learn how the code works. I
mean, that's always really useful. It's difficult to learn from a book,
but it's not impossible. It's when you start really giving yourself a
little test projects to work on and why are you working on things, that's how you
learn the technology. That's how you learn what's possible and that's how you
you get things done. So, I know, you don't have an idea yet. I'm afraid I can't give
you one. If I knew what the big idea was, dude, I'd be doing it! But
keep looking around, know the technology because if you don't
know the technology, you don't know what's gonna be possible and you'll be
like some - every so often I get calls from clients and
they'll say something to me that's totally like not possible. Like, you know,
it's like technically, it's impossible to do. But they don't know the technology
well enough to even know that or the platforms or the permit. What
permissions you need, all that kind of stuff. So anyway, fantastic day
today! Thanks very much for the question and if you got - "Hey, if you, guys, have any
suggestions for good app ideas for him to work on, go ahead and please
put those in the comments. And anyway, that's it for today! I will talk to you,
guys, tomorrow!