34 Brilliant App Ideas to Inspire You
Now entering our tenth year as a community, Developer Camp is a worldwide phenomenon. The most successful—and most fun—idea contest is a Silicon Valley invention that has spread to every continent. With communities of Open Source advocates and creators, inventors and designers of every background, our mission is to increase diversity and promote equality in the technology industry.
Our most recent event was a huge leap forward for equality:
This year, we brought over 220 people together for 48 hours—some of us even stayed over on site in order to keep working. It made us a little goofy:
When it came time for the annual Hackathon Show, we went from cooperation mode, into competition mode:
The ultimate goal is to create amazing teams that trust each other to build awesome demonstrations of their ideas. But as always, our sponsors donated some incredible prizes:
Before the event, we published a guide on how to win our contest:
It looks like some of our attendees read it ;) Here are the results, most of which are Open Source.
iOSDevCamp 2016 Hackathon Show Winners
Most Alarming
Anchor Alarm
Anchor Alarm is an alarm clock app that plays a video of the latest news of the category of your choosing, using the Pulse2 bluetooth speaker. It also features to ability to choose a design to display on the LED, completely developed over the weekend.
- Davey Jay Belliss
- Gwendolyn Richards
- Ben Morse
Best Use of Audio
Audio3DVisualizer
Bored by 2D equalizers? Experience the world around you in a new way by watching a 3D frequency band visualization. This app uses Apple’s SceneKit and the SuperPowered.com Audio Engine. With only a couple hundred lines of Open Source code and completely developed over the weekend, this is a great way to see the graphics visualization code for an audio visualizer.
- Jonathan Ritchey
Best Student App
Ezi
Ezi comes from the Igbo word for “genuine” and reflects our interest in providing users a way to access genuine, reliable information. Using both the Google Cloud Prediction and Glassdoor APIs, Ezi measures the sentiment analysis of employee reviews and potentially doubles the accuracy of current job search algorithms. Developed by a rising 8th grader who has been programming since 10 years old and a WWDC scholarship winner, this is his second time participating in a hackathon. The designer is a is a rising junior at UC Berkeley studying Cognitive Science with minors in Linguistics and Chinese. Although she has taken a few computer science classes in her courses, this is her first hackathon. This app was completely developed over the weekend.
- Dhruv Mangtani
- Emily Vo
- Kiyotaka Takahashi
Most Fashionable
Fashion4Ward
“We want our users to feel as confident as they can by dressing appropriately for every event that they attend.” This app allows users to post a picture of their outfit, and other people can rate it and write comments/suggestions about the outfit. With this, the user is able to determine what outfit they should wear for an event. Five of the seven Open Source team members are currently students.
- Ankita Uppugunduri
- Jiaqi Li
- Steven Zhao
- Danvi Gill
- Becky Chan
- Stella Su
- Dianne Bronola
Most Likely to Get Sued
FlixPass
Join FlixPass and get free access for 24 hours to watch your favorite TV shows and movies from the top video streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO Go, and Amazon Prime. Completely developed at the event, this app has great promise, but struck the judges as a business model challenge. The name is in jest, but is also as a way to recognize this wonderful team.
- Curtiss Pope
- Sandy Gai
- Jaymol George
Best Family App
Huddle
“With one touch, we are all connected.” This voice calling app can create groups for an for emergency situation and also to keep in touch with the family and friends. Developed completely at the event, this app saves calling time. The students on this team are pursuing Masters in Computer Science at Northwestern Polytechnic University, and this is their first hackathon.
This high energy team also received a giant coupon from WAY in recognition of their work.
- Meenakshi RamaMoorthi
- Shirly Manor
- Ozlem Bilis
- Suchitra Gopal
- Asharani S.B
Best …
I’m…
Simply put, the “I’m..” app is an idea engine, fueled by users for users. With a playful and colorful interface, I’m.. encourages you to search for a plan of action when you’re feeling… bored. Or tired. Or annoyed. Or… yes, tired. The app queries its database for ideas provided by others users when they’ve been in the same boat and presents you with a fresh perspective. With I’m.., the solution is ideas through crowdsourcing. The organizers liked this demo enough to create a fun category name for it 🙂
- Skylar Thomas
Privacy Award
Inverse
A Bitcoin mixer app to protect your privacy and anonymity, Inverse was developed entirely over the weekend and is available as Open Source.
- Kiara Robles
- Jake Nisenboim
Coolest App
KidsPlay
This app allows kids to do the heavy lifting when arranging play dates almong the verified list of friends. Parents only have to approve with a tap of button. KidsPlay even integrates with Zum, on-demand ride service for kids to ensure pickups and drop offs are taken care of safely. The 11-year-old with the idea for this app enters middle school in 7th grade. This is his 3rd iOSDevCamp Hackathon, and his third win with an app developed completely over the weekend.
- Yash Narayan
- Joe Pezzillo
- Carl Baltrunas
Firebase Award
King of the Hill
This is an app that allows the user to claim turf with an activity. Say you are the best skateboarder in town. Let people know and challenge you — maybe even find friends with the same hobbies. This Open Source app was developed entirely over this weekend.
- Daniel Richards
- Gwen Richards
- Jon Richards
Run Anywhere Award
Mermania
You are a diver trapped in a tank and need the help of cute sea creatures to escape in this Open Source app. Developed completely on site, this team of high school and college students and one parent worked so hard that the judges made up a category (with a nod to their language of choice: Java).
- Cassie Hamilton
- Matt Oatman
- Sean Gilligan
- Katie Gilligan
Best Web App and Most Photomorphic
MixPX
This app is a new fun way to create artsy photos to share with your friends, family, and social media. Pick two photos and “mix” them. This creates a new photo, which is a combination of the two that were picked. The team, including one freshman in high school, developed the app entirely over the weekend, and made it available as Open Source.
- Ray Saray
- Raymond Braha
- Andrea Kapitan
- Ashley Saray
- Jason Han
- Zhijian Shi
- Lin Wang
- Yuki Gima
Best Heath Care App
My PT Pal
Physical Therapy compliance presents a challenge to patients due to the time required to do exercises. This app can make it easier and faster for patients to find their physical therapy regimens and keep track of their exercises over time. My PT Pal is a single repository for patients to add exercises and create their own collections from those exercises. The emphasis is on user-driven and entered data. This app design, developed entirely over the weekend, can expand into a chart when you did your exercises, progressions (increase in reps or weight), and add a short-term timer for tracking exercises that require holding for 30 seconds.
- Melissa Perenson
Most Neighborly
NeighborFood
Through this app, users directly connect fresh food producers to local customers. Producers sell their products in their neighborhood while customers enjoy local products. Producers take photos of their products soon after they harvest or fish, upload them via the app and their products are on sale within minutes. Customers buy the products through the app and pick up their purchases at a pick up location or via Uber delivery. Customers can favorite their local farmers and interact with them. This app, developed completely over the weekend by a team including one student, is available as Open Source.
- Natsuki Kaku
- Delphine Foo-Matkin
- Eduard Rozenberg
- Ryan Lim
- Yoshiro Tasaka
Best Civic App
Paladin
Using uber rides API, you can get picked up and then book your pickup time for when you are ready to leave your venue, and have text reminders so you never forget. Even going places with friends would be easier as you can all leave at the same time and have the reminders set and sent to the whole group. Get home without having your loved ones and friends worry, because with uber Trip Experiences you could let people in your group or of your choosing track your uber and they could get a notification when you arrive at your destination. The whole goal is to make it as EASY as possible to get where you need to go, while not only being safer for the user, but also other people, because that is potentially another drunk driver off the road. Developed completely over the weekend, and available as Open Source, this app was developed by one student alone.
- Nick Lamela
Most Innovative
Phonetic News
Phonetic News is an RSS reader for English learners. It can display news article with phonetic symbols to maximize your efficiency for English learning. Completely developed on site by one person, this demonstration made it clear how in-app translation could work for learners.
- Hiro Ishiwata
Greenest App
Plan Plant
Plan Plant is an app that helps beginners visually plan and customize their outdoor garden quickly based on their location, budget, care level and plants compatibility. This team, including two college students, developed this app entirely over the weekend.
- Stephanie Kirtiadi
- Muse Chen
- Sharon Weng
- Jacky Lui
Most Literary
Right2Read
The ability to read is a basic civil right, yet 1 in 5 people have difficulty with reading. This situation disproportionately impacts health, poverty, and the prison population. A lot of resources are available to solve this problem, but they are not easily accessed, understood nor implemented effectively. Our solution is to create an assessment tool that provides an individualized learning profile and matches a student’s learning needs with targeted tools and training. The overall goal is to rapidly improve the quality of reading instruction for all. This Open Source app was developed entirely over the weekend by this team which includes a high school freshman. They were also awarded a giant coupon for services delivered by WAY.
- Beth Powell
- Lori Chambers
- Karen Rose
- Portia Sharma
- Avikam Chauhan
Most Social
Round
Take the “Media” out of “Social Media” by using Round. People can organize events in an area and be excited to meet strangers. This app, developed entirely by high school students over the weekend, is available via Open Source.
- Skylar Thomas
- James Hamil
- John Champion
- Zane Helton
Best Game
Terrible Tower
Most multiplayer games are about the game first and socialization second. However, the success of games like Pokemon Go shows that players care about socialization even if the gameplay is simple. Terrible Tower takes advantage of new features in iMessage to meet players in a social space instead of taking them away.
- Siddharth Kotapati
Most Charitable
Running For Real
This app is about helping your local charities just by playing a game on the phone. There are 4 different worlds for 4 different charities in the users area, in which they can run around and on their way collect an item related to their charity. This app is all about helping out charities even if you don’t have the time to physically be there. The 14-year-old maker of this app did this entirely over the weekend.
- Emily Comins
Most Political
Runningmate
Runningmate is a free dating service to connect individuals with shared values and beliefs. Use Runningmate to find the right candidate for you — for a lasting and meaningful relationship. Unlike other apps, Runningmate enables you to search for and find individuals based off their political ideology, party affiliation, and religious background. It also empowers you to weigh in on which issues matter most to you. Available as Open Source, this app was created entirely over the weekend.
- Ashley Scorpio
- Mohamed Ayadi
- Jamar Gibbs
Best Hardware
Segway Demon
This app gives people a wand with full range of movement to control a mischievous demon on the screen. The wand has a bluetooth sensor which talks to an iPhone or iPad device. The accelerometer on the Wand sends the motion. From the developer:
I programmed using Unity 3D using C#. I am 13yrs old and going to high school this fall. People are very helpful at iOSDevCamp always.
I spoke to Vinli team to see if I could use their API for a different idea of a car fan but it did not meet my needs. I explored Firebase which also is a viable option but it has latency (delay) from the wand swipe to see visual response on the screen.
Dom encouraged me as I brainstormed that I switched to this new app idea and helped decide on the wand as the device.
Thanks to the engineers of Way team who helped me research the accelerometer connection options but it was limited to Android.
My dad helped me on the sensor connection part on IOS finally.
- Neha Jamthe
She also received a coupon of unreasonable size for service from WAY.
Best Community App
Sekai no Otaku
This is an app that solves Manga piracy by allowing otaku (super-fans of Anime and Manga) to create pages in support of their favorite artists. Like a mini-kickstarter or Patreon, this culture-specific app connects fans with artists by allowing artists to directly reward them for support.
- Kana Oeno
Most Educational
Shapes on a Plane
An app for classroom teachers to help keep track of students and how they’re doing. This working Open Source app was developed entirely over the weekend, and features dragging and dropping, tilting and arranging desks, naming them, sorting them, and camera view for overlaying the map onto the room.
- Mike Ellard
- Bruce Choi
- Winnie Chen
Best New Developer
SmartCamera
SmartCamera makes sure everyone in your group photo is smiling and has their eyes open. If not, the app provides advice to improve the situation. Although their Japanese developer had only been coding for two weeks, the team created this app entirely over the weekend.
- Hiroyuki Gohara
- Misa Gohara
Best Developer Tool
TutorialKit
This Open Source framework encompasses ready-made tutorial types that iOS developers can use to add in-line help to their app, allowing them to reduce their time to market. The eye-catching tutorial types include sliding banners, information bubbles, and pulsing circles, and are customizable to match the look-and-feel of an already-existing app.
- Tim Kokesh
- Lee Cooper
Most Useful
UNTangledd
From the developers:
Most of our work isn’t manual labor anymore. More and more of our time is spent using and sometimes overtaxing our minds. On a daily basis, we are inundated with information, ideas, and tasks. In order to be productive, maintain focus, and avoid decision fatigue — it is important to stay organized. In the current app ecosystem, our notes, thoughts, tasks, and goals are scattered. Healthy habits such as keeping and organizing everything in one place as well as preparing each evening for the next day can enable achievement. Untangledd is our solution to life’s most common problem.
- Laurel Jensen
- Aeryk Blair
- Brad Anderson Smith
Most Pixelated
Voxel Terrain Generator
This simulator generates and flies through a voxel-earth-like terrain — think endless Minecraft-style worlds — automatically. Developed entirely over the weekend by one college student as a way to learn Swift, this app is available via Open Source.
- Andrew Dudney
Vinli Award
On Ur Way
This app lets the user make a list of pick ups / errands things you have for the day and will send you a reminder when you are in the vicinity of the location pointed out in list. Uses Vinli and Google places APIs to detect the matching geofence locations.
- Bilahari Akkiraju
Best App for Social Change
We Vote
We Vote is building the political social network for America, as an Open Source non-profit volunteer movement. Too many people think their vote doesn’t count. We Vote will change this.
- Jayadev Akkiraju
- Ryan Lim
- Dale McGrew
- Colette Phair
Best Open Source App
Writemate
This is an app to help summarize lectures, presentations, and assignments as well as help with English writing. Writemate deciphers text from images and audio and performs algorithms on the data to give a concise and accurate summary. The team expanded the application from its original design to help identify errors and improvements in writing and be a personal tutor. The incoming high school freshman team makes this app, developed entirely over the weekend, available via Open Source.
- Raghav Ganesh
- Kavish Trivedi
- Lakshay Maharana
Most Helpful
WAY
This is iOSDevCamp’s most valuable and vaunted prize. Throughout the weekend, organizers give tickets to attendees who feel that they’ve been helped a lot. The attendees give those tickets to their helpers. In this way, the most helpful person at the event is rewarded by multiple people as they do more good work.
Our sponsor for prizes and food pooled their tickets, and the WAY team ended up helping almost as many people at the event as Google did! Google had more tickets, but ceded their prize to WAY because of the nature of the prize (cloud-hosted services). Of course, we gave the Google Firebase team some fun stuff to take home.
Thank you, WAY for being so generous with your time to others during the event. Congratulations for winning a year of co-location with MacStadium!
Best Sacrifice to the Demo Gods
iOSDevCamp Organizers
Usually we recognize a team who tried really hard and had a great demonstration, but failed because of technical difficulties. Because no one’s demo failed this year (!), we organizers took home this giant skull award. We deserve it because we took waaaay too long to judge the winners, and get this blog post up. We are working on way to improve this process for next year.
In the lead-up to our next annual event in July 2017, we will be posting here about the teams and their progress. We will also show everyone how we run these events, and what kind of “innovation culture” creates a certain kind of bond, and this amount of success.
Please subscribe and stay tuned for more inspiring stories from the heart of Silicon Valley and around the world.
