What’s your dumbest app idea
What’s your dumbest app idea
I need too build one for school, I figure this would be a way to brainstorm
Pizza Peacemaker. If you're with a bunch of people with varying tastes and want to order pizza, you open the app and pass your phone around. Each person in turn puts in what they like and how much they want to eat. At the end the app tells you what you should order and how you should split the bill.
I like that, I thought of an idea similar where it gives you a bunch of movies and in tinder styles select a few. It will show the movies and your friends "liked"
I made a web app like this long ago! https://how2pizza.com, you could send a link out in advance of an event and then people could suggest types of pizza and vote for all the ones they liked. After all the votes, the organizer would decide how many people per pizza, and the app would tell you what to order.
The algorithm was designed to balance popular options with the needs of those with dietary restrictions. It recognizes that some folks only have a few menu options they can actually eat, and it guarantees they won’t get stuck with cheese. The way it worked is the “pickiest” people (i.e. those who only voted for one or two types of non-cheese pizza) would be guaranteed a pizza they can eat first. If the individual voted for more than one type, then the more popular option is favored. Cheese was a special case and there was logic to make sure it was only chosen after everyone got a slice of something they specifically wanted.
We used it a bunch in university for club events and stuff, and it worked great. Hopefully this is helpful and a good inspiration. Be warned about the code quality—the all hasn’t been updated in 8 years old!
If you’re curious, the main algorithm can be found here: https://github.com/ianonavy/how2pizza/blob/master/how2pizza/pizza/static/main.js
This would be kinda fun to play with from a "game theory" standpoint too. Unscrupulous people could attempt to maximize their pizza consumption and minimize their capital investment by claiming to not be very hungry and being willing to eat the most common toppings.
Perhaps the app could have a function at the end to "rate" the participant diners? You could pass your phone around one more time and people could assign a "trustworthiness score" to one another.
Free after xkcd: an app that’s you can ask if today is Christmas. It answers always „no“ and can be advertised with „99,73% accuracy“
Anybody remember “I’m Rich”?
What about an app which lists all visible WiFi networks and as you walk around, it tries to triangulate the source? It will fail in some cases due to reflections and obstacles, but when in line of sight or with few obstacles, could be a fun and interactive app.
You would need to familiarize yourself with the networking api on your phone, retrieve signal SSIDs to distinguish them, then retrieve signal strength, then estimate your own position (either precise location estimated by your phone or estimate it yourself using accelerometer and gyroscope and integrate over the retrieved data points to know how far you moved in each direction). Not sure what familiarity level you are at with any of this but the maths involved are all things I learned in school.
You could easily show how well it works by having another phone act as a temporary hotspot and see whether you can show an arrow towards it and possibly estimate distance.
Edit: estimating distance will be tricky, because you would need to know/estimate the signal emission power and that is probably different for all kinds of routers, some are even dynamic. But identifying the direction of the source is very much doable.
If that's your dumbest idea, you are undervalued wherever you work. That sounds like a pretty interesting idea.
I thought it would be more engaging to propose a simple yet interactive app =] glad you like it. Joy in programming drives learning and motivation.
Interesting idea, and honestly sounds fun. I was planning on using react native, so I’ll check expos network api
Dumbest?
Probably one of those old school flashlight apps... that just turn your screen white
I remember having one of those on my ipod, thinking that this is the peak
A tinder style interface to adopt animals from local shelters. Scrape data from local shelters, aspcas, etc, when you swipe right on an animal your info is sent to the shelter and they receive your application. Lower the barrier of entry and potentially increase adoption rates.
And now that I think about it maybe you’d potentially increase impulse adoptions that get returned/abandoned so maybe don’t make this
Oh no. Not gonna trick me again.
The last time I gave away my dumbest app idea, someone stole it and made Twitter.
A Braille-to-speech app. Point the camera at the Braille part of a sign, and be told what it says.
Intended user base: Users who can't read due to sight impairment, can't read Braille directly either for whatever reason, and couldn't find a general-purpose OCR app capable of reading the ordinary text.
Or they could do the easier thing and make it read the sign above the braille
Fart Cow. 🐄💨
It displays a cartoon loop of a cow munching on some grass. 🐮
If you poke the cow, it farts. 💨
If you poke the cow a second time, it pops up a micropayment screen where you can pay 10¢ to have it fart again right away; or you can put it into the background and it will fart at some random time in the next 10 minutes for free. (This is a "delayed fart".) 💰
Every additional fart costs 10% more, and plays at a louder volume. 🔊
At ten farts, you get a "butt trumpet" which is a longer and more melodious fart. 🎺
Even without paying, you can queue up lots of delayed farts. ⏲
If you open the app and poke the cow a dozen times without paying, it will fart once, then queue up delayed farts over the next two hours. These farts will be played over whatever else you're doing with your phone; one of them will be a "butt trumpet" at maximum volume. 🐄💨💨💨
The only way to cancel a delayed fart is to pay for it to be played immediately. 💸
@fubo @WalkableProgrammer brilliant
Mosquito detector with foot print for unlock.
“I have a really great idea for a social networking app…”
oh god no
How about an app that makes calls, but you have to dial like you would with an old rotary phone.
If you make a mistake with the rotations it just connects you to a random one of your contacts.
Haven't seen it in a minute, but it definitely used to exist.
I would 100% both use and pay for it - forces me to put a bit more thought into phone trees, making me less likely to get lost in them.
This has abd i believe but I think it doesn't get much dumber: an app that turns your phone into a pocket/hand warmer by maxing out the CPU with some stupid intense tasks. Maybe add a bonfire screensaver for best effects.
It's stupid af.... Unless you have responsibly charged your phone through your multi-day backwoods hike and it saves your ass.
Wouldn't suggest it as a frontline defense, of course, but... I can see a use case that saves a life, or at least a limb.
A calendar app where you input any date and it will return a yes/no response if that is is today's date or not. Similar to the websites that tell you if today is Christmas or not.
An app that’s like Uber or Lyft, but it only calls your friends who have cars and would be willing/able to give you a ride. It shows you how far they are (if they share location with the app) and how long it would take to get you to your destination. Based on the trip distance and current prices, it could also suggest how much you would owe if you wanted to cover their gas.
I have an inside joke with a friend who lives nearby that if she ever needs a ride she should download an app that’s like Uber but it only calls me. I think if I actually made it, she would actually put it in her rideshare folder and use it instead of forgetting to message me! So yeah if you made it and it was open source I might actually use it haha
I'd make something dumb with real world applications. A chat-gpt chat bot with attitude or only wrong answers. An app that only allows the user to make a paypal donation to you. Etc etc
You could probably figure out some unique version of the dice rollers or player pickers.
Dice roller just rolls a set (specify number) on a click. I’ve used for board games. You could probably do something similar but different. Like a random color picker, random 1-10 picker, or random name picker (from a user list).
Player pickers work like 5 people put their finger on the phone and will randomly pick one person to be first player. Again, useful for board games. I could see it assigning a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd player. You could even spin it like for a 3v3 basketball game. It will put 6 people in 2 groups or something like that.
Forgot your tennis racket at home? Download the e-racket for the most portable racket on the market. Upgrade to pro today and you can use it as a baseball bat instead!
An app that pings people in the area if you need somebody to watch your dog while you go into a store, so you don’t have to tie them up outside or bring them in. And you pay your matched dog watcher by the minute.
An app that immediately, purposefully, crashes your phone.
I would see value on this for making excuses to my boss. Extra points if you mimic some meeting services crash screens.